"Yes, and he's too brilliant. He is brilliant, Frenny." She stood looking at her old friend with confident insistent eyes; it always fortified her faith in her husband to impress it on others. And really she did believe in The Hour, and in what he and she were going to make of it… .

The door opened, and there he was, slender, distinguished, handsomer than ever, she thought, as her eyes challenged the calm face under which she knew such a hunger for approbation burned.

"Hallo, Frenside—" Lewis Tarrant nodded to his wife and strolled up to the fireplace with his unhurried step. "Cold as the devil outdoors." He bent over the flame, stretching his nervous transparent hands to it. ("With hands like that," Halo mused, "why isn't he a poet?")

Tarrant dropped into an armchair near the tea-table. "No—a cocktail, please. I'm frozen to the marrow. Cursed climate!"

She handed him the cocktail, and in passing laid her hand on his shoulder. "You're tired, Lewis—you've been overworking." It did her good to be able, in all sincerity, to rebuke him for that!

"Well, it is hard work—straightening things out. But I think I begin to see my way." He spoke with the cold sparkle of voice and face which was his nearest approach to enthusiasm. "By the way, though—it wasn't all just hacking and hewing. I've made a find." He picked up a bundle of papers he had thrown down, and extracted from them a copy of The Hour.

"What about this, Frenside? I never heard of it before—it must have come out while we were honeymooning, Halo."

The word startled her, on his lips. Was it all so long ago that he seemed to be speaking a dead language? She shook off the chill and put out her hand for the review—an old number, as Lewis said, battered from long kicking about in the office. "What? Oh—this: 'One Day'? A story, is it?" She wrinkled her brows over her shortsighted eyes. "Lewis! Why, it's by that boy: the Tracys' cousin. The one … " She broke off, and felt the colour rising to her temples. Vance Weston—she had not thought of Vance Weston since her marriage. Yet what a score he had against her! She had never been able to acquit herself of that; if ever the chance to do so arose, how gladly she would seize it! She bent above the page, curious, excited, with the little half articulate murmurs of the born reader. "How queer that I never heard of this… . Yes, it came out the winter we were in Egypt." (Her chronology of her married life was more topographic than sentimental.) She looked up at Frenside. "I suppose he sent it to you, Frenny, after that time you met him at Eaglewood?"