Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill TD Y morning it had become a dream. - Eldridge was late and he hurried from the house and hurried all the morning to catch up. By luncheon time he was in another world. He took plenty of time for his luncheon; it was one of the things he had learned — to eat his luncheon slowly and take time to digest it. Sometimes he read the paper, sometimes he dropped into a moving-picture show for a few minutes afterward. But to-day he did neither. He sat in the restaurant — it was a crowded restaurant, all America coming and going — and he watched it idly. He had a rested,comfortable feeling, as if he had escaped some calamity. It seemed foolish now, as he looked back — a kind of fever in the blood that had twisted the commonest things into queer shape. He looked back over it dispassionately — it was the woman in Merwin's who had started it, of course; there was something about her — something like Rosalind — curiously like her — it was like what Rosalind might have been, more than what she was — a kind of spirited-up Rosalind! He smiled grimly. He called for his check; and while he waited he saw her again, the figure of the woman — not in the restaurant — but in a kind of vision — in the alcove behind the curtain, her head a little bent, her hands folded quietlyin her lap . . . who was she — ? His heart gave a sudden twist and stopped — He had never felt like this about — any one — had he ? He looked down at a red check, with its stamped black figures, and fumbled in his pocket — and brought out a coin and laid it beside the check and stared at it. ... The check and the coin slipped away and he stared at the marble top. Suppose he saw her — again . . . some time. . . . Two coins reappeared on the table and he picked them up. Then he put back one and felt for...