about Mr. Durrett's way--even in this suddenly advanced age--the better.
As for Nancy, she seemed to the distant eye to be walking through life in
a stately and triumphant manner. I read in the newspapers of her doings,
her comings and goings; sometimes she was away for months together, often
abroad; and when she was at home I saw her, but infrequently, under
conditions more or less formal. Not that she was formal,--or I: our
intercourse seemed eloquent of an intimacy in a tantalizing state of
suspense. Would that intimacy ever be renewed? This was a question on
which I sometimes speculated. The situation that had suspended or put an
end to it, as the case might be, was never referred to by either of us.

One afternoon in the late winter of the year following that in which we
had given a dinner to the Scherers (where the Durretts had rather
marvellously appeared together) I left my office about three o'clock--a
most unusual occurrence. I was restless, unable to fix my mind on my
work, filled with unsatisfied yearnings the object of which I sought to
keep vague, and yet I directed my steps westward along Boyne Street until
I came to the Art Museum, where a loan exhibition was being held. I
entered, bought a catalogue, and presently found myself standing before
number 103, designated as a portrait of Mrs. Hambleton Durrett,--painted
in Paris the autumn before by a Polish artist then much in vogue,
Stanislaus Czesky. Nancy--was it Nancy?--was standing facing me, tall,
superb in the maturity of her beauty, with one hand resting on an antique
table, a smile upon her lips, a gentle mockery in her eyes as though
laughing at the world she adorned. With the smile and the
mockery--somehow significant, too, of an achieved inaccessibility--went
the sheen of her clinging gown and the glint of the heavy pearls drooping
from her high throat to her waist. These caught the eye, but failed at
length to hold it, for even as I looked the smile faded, the mockery
turned to wistfulness. So I thought, and looked again--to see the