still Rodney Aldrich, had just said to Rose--and meant.

To that man, the priceless hour of the day had always been precisely
this one, the first waking hour, when his mind, in the enjoyment of a
sort of clairvoyant limpidity, had been wont to challenge its stiffest
problems, wrestle with them, and whether triumphant or not, despatch him
to his office avid for the day's work and strides ahead of where he had
left it the night before.

He spent that hour very differently now. He spent all his hours, even
the formal working ones, differently. And the terrifying thing was that
he hadn't resisted the change, hadn't wanted to resist, didn't want to
now, as he sat there looking down at her--at the wonderful hair which
framed her face and, in its two thick braids, the incomparable whiteness
of her throat and bosom--at the slumberous glory of her eyes.

So, when she asked him what he was looking so solemn about, he said with
more truth than he pretended to himself, that it was enough to make
anybody solemn to look at her. And then, to break the spell, he asked
her why she had laughed a little while back, over something she had said
about Robert W. Chambers' novels.

"I was thinking," she said, "of the awful disgrace I got into yesterday,
with somebody--well, with Bertram Willis, by saying something like that.
I'll have to tell you about it."

Bertram Willis, it should be said, was the young architect with the
upturned mustaches and the soft Byronic collars, who had done the house
for the McCreas. And I must warn you to take the adjective young, with a
grain of salt. Youth was no mere accident with him. He made an art of