She had always thought that he must come back; for years the fear
had haunted her at every street crossing, at every ring of Linda's
doorbell. At first it had been but a shivering apprehension of his
claims, an anticipation of what he might expect or want from her.
Then came a saner time, when she told herself that she was an
independent human being as well as he, that she might meet his
argument with argument, and his threat with threat.

But for the past year or two her lessening thoughts of him had
taken new form. Harriet had hoped that when they met again she
might be in a position to punish Royal Blondin, to look down at
him from heights that even his audacity might not scale.

That time, she told herself in the fever of the night, had not yet
come. Her pitiful achievements, her beauty, her French and
Spanish, her sober book reading, and her little affectations of
fine linen and careful speech, all seemed to crumple to nothing.
She seemed again to be the furious, helpless, seventeen-year-old
Harriet of the Watertown days, her armour ineffectual against that
suave and self-confident presence.

"Oh, how I hate him!" whispered the dry lips in the silence of the
night. And looking up at the wheeling grave procession of powdery
jewels against the velvet of the sky, Harriet had mused on escape,
on a disappearance as complete as her flight years ago had proved
to be.

She had forced herself to unbind the wrappings, to look at the old
wound. She had gone in spirit to that old, shabby parlour to which