Why not the drawing room for cocktails? she wondered. Why the study? That was Gordon’s room, as the dainty-chintz morning room was supposed to be hers. Usually he didn’t allow casual visitors into his sanctum. Oh, but this man was not a casual visitor. He was…something about a biography. That explained the study. Michael What’s-’is-name was going to get the full effect-the rows on rows of learned volumes, the windows opening onto the beauty of the countryside. And in the midst of it all, Gordon himself, the sage, the scholar, who had abandoned the hollow sham of the world for a life of contemplation.

The door was open. She could hear their voices as she approached: Gordon’s mellow baritone, the softer, higher voice of Jack Briggs, Gordon’s secretary, and another voice…deeper even than Gordon’s, slower, drawling. For no reason at all, a shiver ran through her and she stopped, knees waxy-soft, and put one hand out blindly for support against the satiny surface of the paneled wall.

The spasm lasted only a second. She shook herself and went on, wondering. Something was going to happen. Good or bad? Were there such categories, or were things-happenings, people-amoral, to be judged only by their effects on others? “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so…”

She came to the door and stood there, looking at them.

Amid the bustle of their rising, she caught two swift impressions. One was the barely perceptible relief in Gordon’s face as he took in her appearance: exquisitely gowned, coiffed, and made up, poised and calm. The other impression was simply that of a man, a stranger, and never, afterward, could she reduce it to details. He was there; his presence was enough.

Yet he was not, on second glance, a particularly good-looking man. A few inches taller even than Gordon’s respectable height, he seemed to be strung together with old elastic, so that his movements looked gawky and abrupt beside Gordon’s disciplined grace. His hair was mousy brown, combed carelessly back from a side parting; his mouth was too wide and his face had a lopsided look, as if one jaw were longer than the other. The only feature that might be called handsome were his eyes, and their beauty lay in their expression rather than their color, which was a brown slightly darker than his hair.