"Over—why?"

"Because my husband's arriving; I'm going back to New York to join him."

The words fell on his excited brain like little blows from some deadly instrument. At first he hardly felt them—then his head reeled with the shock, and for a moment he found no word to say.

"But you're all right now; I mean the book's all right—you can see your way ahead; can't you, Vance?"

He still looked up at her incredulously. "I can't see anything but you."

"Oh—" she murmured, and sat down once more, facing him across the familiar table. "Well, no wonder: we've looked at each other like this nearly every day for two months now… ."

Vance was not listening. He had reached the same degree of absorption which, the day he had met Laura Lou in the rubberneck car, had made it impossible to fix his attention on what she was saying. He sat looking at Halo Tarrant with a concentration as remote as possible from that April ecstasy, yet as intense. "I feel as if I'd never looked at you before," he blundered out.

"I don't believe you ever did!" she said. Her lips began a smile; then they became grave, and her slow colour mounted. She sat motionless, giving him back his gaze so steadfastly that hers seemed to enter into his eyes and slip down their long windings to his very soul. She dropped her lids after a while, and made a motion to rise again. "But you'll know me now, won't you, the next time we meet?"

He made no answer. Her banter hung in a meaningless dazzle somewhere outside of him; all his real self was within, centred in the effort of holding her image fast, of tracing it, line by line, curve by curve, with the passionate hands of memory. She who had seemed to him but a disembodied intelligence was now stealing into every vein and fibre like wine, like wind, like all the seed-bearing currents of spring. He looked at her hands, which lay folded before her on the table, and wondered what their hidden palms were like, and the dimpled recess of her inner arm at the elbow. "No, I've never known you," he repeated stupidly.

"Oh, but we've been … but we've been… ." She broke off, and began again, in a more decided tone: "Your book has reached a point now when it will be all the better for you to go on with it alone. A writer oughtn't to get too dependent on anybody's advice. If I've been able to help you … "