She came in a taxicab, which she dismissed at the corner. From the
house steps she looked first eastward and then westward, as though to
make sure she was not being followed. Then she rang the bell.

She gave no name; yet she was at once admitted. Her visit, in fact,
seemed to be expected, for without hesitation she was ushered upstairs
and into the library of the First Deputy.

He was waiting for her in a room more intimate, more personal, more
companionably crowded than his office, for the simple reason that it
was not a room of his own fashioning. He stood in the midst of its
warm hangings, in fact, as cold and neutral as the marble Diana behind
him. He did not even show, as he closed the door and motioned his
visitor into a chair, that he had been waiting for her.

The woman, still standing, looked carefully about the room, from side
to side, saw that they were alone, made note of the two closed doors,
and then with a sigh lifted her black gloved hands and began to remove
the widow's cap from her head. She sighed again as she tossed the
black crepe on the dark-wooded table beside her. As she sank into the
chair the light from the electrolier fell on her shoulders and on the
carefully coiled and banded hair, so laboriously built up into a crown
that glinted nut-brown above the pale face she turned to the man
watching her.

"Well?" she said. And from under her level brows she stared at
Copeland, serene in her consciousness of power. It was plain that she
neither liked him nor disliked him. It was equally plain that he, too,
had his ends remote from her and her being.