The girl with the roses in her hat was still standing in the doorway by her husband’s side. I should go and talk to them, Minna thought; they don’t seem to know anyone. All the same, they looked quite contented. She glanced round at Phil, but Evie had just come up to him with a question; she laid her hand on his arm—beseechingly and not in her public, clamorous way—and he put his head down to hers. Minna set her glass on the table. Theodore, smiling broadly, had turned away from the man with the beard. She exchanged a glance with him, and wondered what his mood would be when they were alone.

“Have you looked in the refrigerator?” Phil was saying. His head remained lowered to Evie’s a moment longer. Minna looked away, as if she had seen them embrace.

The girl by the door was laughing now, the roses shaking on her hat, and the man beside her was leaning against the doorframe and smiling at her.

Minna took up her glass again and turned it in her hand, and went on watching them—with admiration, as one might watch an intricate dance executed with perfect grace; and with something like homesickness, as if she were looking at colored slides of a country in which she had once been happy.

“I behaved rather well, didn’t I?” he asked. “All things considered.”

She came and knelt beside his chair and kissed him. “Admirably,” she said. He put his arm about her but she disengaged herself and settled on the floor, leaning against his legs. “It wasn’t so bad, now, was it?”

“You sound just like my dentist.” He stretched back in his chair, his palms resting on his knees and the fingers of his right hand just touching her hair.

The one lighted lamp, at his elbow, allowed them to see little more than each other and a pale semicircle of the rug on which she sat. She lowered her head and watched the bright shine of his shoe, which was half hidden by a fold of her dress. Outside their crescent of light, beyond the obscured but familiar room, the cold wind blew from time to time against the windows and the traffic sounded faintly from below. During the day there had been a brief fall of snow and, frozen at the window ledges, this now sealed them in. She tilted her head back against his knees. “It’s so nice here,” she said, and smiled.

He passed his hand round her throat, his extended fingers reaching from ear to ear. Her hair spread over his sleeve. “Minna dear,” he said. “Minna darling.”

She suddenly sat upright and raised her hand to her head. “I’ve lost an earring. It must be at the Fergusons’.”

“No, it’s here,” he said. “In the other room. On the table beside the bed.”

“Are you sure?”