were only experimental, as though she expected the blue sky above them
to deliver itself of a bolt.

But by this time she had become a habit with him. He liked her even in
her moodiest moments. When, one day, she suggested that they go away
together, anywhere so long as it was away, he merely laughed at her
childishness.

It was, in fact, Blake himself who went away. After nine weeks of
alternating suspense and happiness that seemed nine weeks of
inebriation to him, he was called out of the city to complete the
investigation on a series of iron-workers' dynamite outrages. Daily he
wrote or wired back to her. But he was kept away longer than he had
expected. When he returned to New York she was no longer there. She
had disappeared as completely as though an asphalted avenue had opened
and swallowed her up. It was not until the following winter that he
learned she was again with Connie Binhart, in southern Europe.

He had known his one belated love affair. It had left no scar, he
claimed, because it had made no wound. Binhart, he consoled himself,
had held the woman in his power: there had been no defeat because there
had been no actual conquest. And now he could face her without an
eye-blink of conscious embarrassment. Yet it was good to remember that
Connie Binhart was going to be ground in the wheels of the law, and
ground fine, and ground to a finish.

"What did you want me for, Jim?" the woman was again asking him. She
spoke with an intimate directness, and yet in her attitude were subtle
reservations, a consciousness of the thin ice on which they both stood.
Each saw, only too plainly, the need for great care, in every step. In