Stephen looked into her well-remembered eyes. “I’ve never forgotten them,” he told her quietly.

Helen would not give him the slightest sign of response.

“I suppose,” she went on serenely, “like most young people of our time we tried to settle all the weighty questions of the day, didn’t we?”

Stephen felt a pang of disappointment. The years since last he saw Helen had not been a dream. They were real—every one of them was real, and Helen was as far removed, as beyond recall, as his youth. There she sat opposite him, graceful, lovely, beautifully poised upon her horse (beautifully poised in speech and manner, too), as impervious to him as a picture. She looked at him kindly, graciously, but disinterestedly as if he were a part of the landscape. He turned away from her tranquil face.

“You must come to dinner with us some day,” he heard her saying in that cool, smooth, impersonal voice of hers.

“Thank you very much,” he replied perfunctorily, not looking back at her. Oh, he, too, could be cool and smooth and impersonal if that was what she really wanted.

3

IT WAS WHAT she really wanted. When he dined for the first time at the Cornelius Morrison’s there were half a dozen other guests present. He sat nowhere near his hostess, nor did she give him any chance for conversation after dinner. It was always like that. As time went on, Stephen was frequently in the same drawing-room with Helen, and often one of the same party, but she always contrived to avoid all opportunity for intimate conversation.

Stephen was hungry to talk to Helen. He had no intention of making love to her. She needn’t have been afraid. He was scarcely less free than she. He simply wanted to sit occasionally, for short periods, in an outer circle of the warm sunshine of her radiating sympathy. But she wouldn’t let him. Her insistence upon a purely impersonal basis of intercourse made anything but the merest superficialities impossible.

When Cornelius Morrison met Stephen Dallas, he took a fancy to the young man. They had several interests in common. Cornelius and Stephen went on a fall fishing-trip together six months after Stephen met Helen in Central Park. Stephen was often at Helen’s house after the fishing-trip. Cornelius would bring him home to dinner unannounced. After dinner the two men would play long games of chess in the library, while Helen read to her boys in a room above. Of course Stephen saw Helen alone sometimes, but never for longer than a passing moment or two. Helen always had something to call her away. And during those passing moments or two she was always clothed in her armor.