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 to me alone—she had that manner—but she doesn't. Then of course there's another thing rather queer."

"What is it?"

"Well—it could hardly be a coincidence."

"What couldn't?"

Claire looked at her mother searchingly. "Have you noticed how much more constantly she's with him than she was at first?"

"Is she?"

"She's with him absolutely all the time he's out of his room. She used to leave him, for an hour or so, quite often; but now she never does. It's as if she didn't want to leave him alone—alone with anybody else. I haven't been alone with him since I don't know how long!"

"My dear child! Why should you be alone with him? It strikes me you say some pretty personal things to him under conditions that might almost be called semi-public! I don't know much more you could do if you were alone with him; and the poor man himself looks troubled enough when you do it, as it is!"

"Yes, but" Claire said dreamily. "Do you think perhaps she has a kind of sisterly jealousy of me?"

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 "No, I don't," Mrs. Ambler replied with emphasis. "She isn't that type at all. She's a good woman, generous I'm sure; and she thinks of nothing in the world but her brother's welfare. By the way, speaking of welfare, the season here is getting rather late. Don't you think it's about time we were on our way back to Paris, as we planned? We've already been here a month longer than we intended to be when we came."

"Oh, Paris!" the daughter said impatiently. "I don't care if I never see Paris again!"

"We can't stay here into the very hot weather. Nobody does."

"Yes, but" Claire murmured, and sat frowning. "Surely she can't think that keeping me from ever being alone with him would do his welfare any good. I've told her myself that I'd do anything in the world for him."

"You told her that, Claire?"

"Yes," Claire said, and her softened eyes grew bravely moist, even under her mother's direct gaze. "I told her I'd give my life to be of any use to him. Then why does she"

Mrs. Ambler, herself troubled, shook her head. "I don't know, Claire."

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 "I'm sure she believed me. It's true—I would give my life in an instant. Mother, she must have believed me!"

This insistence implied a doubt that need not have existed; the Englishwoman had believed her, and at that same hour was forth upon an errand she would otherwise have spared herself. Having left her brother drowsing in his cell, Miss Orbison trudged sturdily through the long stone great street of Raona, passed under the archway of the ancient town gates, and went on for some hundreds of paces beyond the ruined medieval walls. Then she paused at the panelled green doorway of an enclosed garden, and pulled vigorously upon an iron chain. A rusty bell that hung upon a wrought-iron hoop above the door rang as heartily as she seemed to desire.

When the door opened, a swarthy little maid in an old-fashioned Raonese peasant's costume appeared, a brilliant scarf about her dark head, a striped red-and-white shawl over her black bodice, gay embroideries encrusting her long green skirt. She stood smiling and bowing archly in the doorway. "Buon' giorno,Buon'giorno [sic] signora."

"Il signore è in casa?" Miss Orbison asked.

"Si, signora. Prego!" Then the little creature,

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 barefooted, ran up the garden terraces to the white villa above, and disappeared within a Saracen doorway. This was the entrance to the studio, Miss Orbison knew, and by the time she had ascended to it, Eugene Rennie had come out of it to welcome her.

"You're painting?" she asked. "I'm interrupting?"

He would have liked to tell her the truth, which was that he wanted to go on working; but having taken note of her expression, he said that he had finished for the day; and they sat down together upon the wide marble steps of the topmost terrace.

"Something about Charles?" he said.

"Yes."

"He's no worse?"

"Of course every hour he's an hour worse," she said with a tremor in her voice; but she controlled it manfully. "He doesn't look worse, hour by hour—he couldn't well do that—but no matter how he looks, the end of his suffering is always just that much nearer in sight. The pain is never unbearable, and often he's hardly conscious of it—perhaps because he's so used to it. The doctors told me precisely how it would be, and everything's confirmed them; I never doubted they were right. If only that specialist

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 hadn't told him!" She stretched her gloved hands convulsively in her lap, then sighed loudly and relaxed them. "But there! It's done, and we have to make the best of it; but that isn't what I've come to you about."

"You know I'll do anything," Rennie said.

"Yes, I know you will. I'm afraid I'm here to ask you to do something difficult."

"What is it?"

"Do you remember one morning when you and Charles and I were watching Miss Ambler and Don Arturo Liana as they sat by the railing of the hotel garden, and Charles looked so absurdly depressed?"

"Yes; he seemed gloomy about Arturo's filling Miss Ambler's heart. I was delighted."

"I was rather pleased myself, Mr. Rennie. I thought it would be good for him to take a little interest in her, like that."

"Don't you think it has?"

"No," she said. "If it had remained a little interest we'd have been right to be pleased." She shook her head. "It hasn't."

"No?" Rennie looked puzzled. "You don't think he's serious about her?"

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, yet with a tense, frantic haste, Scarface Tony Camonte went down the hall, peering intently at the brass numbers on the doors, his hand rigid about the butt of the heavy automatic in his side coat pocket.

Then he found it. 612. He halted and turned toward the door, gathering himself like a furious animal making ready to spring. With the silent, effortless ease of a fatal snake, his practiced right hand drew the automatic, then gently dropped to his side. Then his left hand reached out to the door-knob, and he quietly tried it. But the door was locked.

Tony's lips curled into a vicious snarl and his clenched fist banged savagely against the polished wood of the fastened door. There was a pause. Then:

"What do you want?" came the angry growl from within.

"Come out here!" snapped Tony, and instinc- 235

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 "I'm afraid he's dangerously liable to be serious about her."

Dangerously,' Miss Orbison? You mean it might be dangerous for him to care for a rather flirtatious and light-headed young creature who doesn't care for him?"

"No. It's because she does care for him."

Rennie looked astonished. "You think she does?"

"She's as much as told me so, and she was in earnest. She cares for him as deeply as it's in her nature to care at her age, I'm quite positive; and that's what is cruelly dangerous for Charles."

"You think he could be really in love with her, do you?"

"He's trying with all his poor broken strength not to be," she answered unhappily. "Do you understand why he tries not to be in love with her? Do you understand why he mustn't be, Mr. Rennie?"

"A little—perhaps," he said doubtfully. "But it's the very breath of romance to believe that the happiness found in mutual love makes even tragedy celestial."

Miss Orbison projected an audible sniff from her nostrils. "Yes; it's the 'very breath of romance,'

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 and it's a wicked nonsense for human beings to believe it enough to act upon it! Don't you see that Charles understands, and that he's trying to save himself?"

"From what?"

"From agony, Mr. Rennie. From an absolutely useless and futile agony. We'll look at it in a plain way—a matter-of-fact way, if you please—without any romance. He'd got through the worst of it when we came here; he'd no chance but to accept, and he was fairly well resigned to it. He'd been through his rebellion and he knew rebellion was no good. Sometimes you could see a little of it left—in his eyes, or in some impatient thing he said; but he'd nevertheless accepted what he knew was absolute and inevitable. He has it fixed in his mind that the end will be in the autumn; October, he thinks—he's spoken of it several times. Well, he'd made himself almost placid about it. He'd loved life in the natural way most of us love it; but after all he felt he hadn't a great deal to live for. The war had shut his career off short; and for people near his heart he had only some friends—and me." She paused for a moment and her stout shoulders stiffened. "Well, a man can bear to die and leave a sister, Mr. Rennie."

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 Rennie nodded sympathetically. "Yes."

"If he had fallen a little in love with this pretty young thing," she went on, "and if the girl hadn't cared for him, it wouldn't have mattered; it might even have helped him not to mind dying. But for him to see that she adores him—and I'm afraid she does—for him to recognize the fact that he cares for her and to find life offering him what he'd believe a glittering, glorious happiness in almost the moment when he has to be done with life forever—oh!" Miss Orbison cried. "That would be horrible, Mr. Rennie!"

"Yes," Rennie said. "I think it would. The pain would outweigh the happiness."

Happiness,' Mr. Rennie? Charles knows it wouldn't be happiness at all; he knows it would be an unspeakable anguish to take this new beautiful thing into his life only to be wrenched from it! He's trying so hard to spare himself that. He can bear dying; but he can't bear dying unbearably! He's doing everything he can to avoid believing that the girl cares for him and that he cares for her. You see, it's her caring that is the peril. If he could believe her what we thought her at first, just a light-hearted young coquette flirting with these queer Raonese

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 men and handsome boys like Liana, and not seriously troubling her head about him, he could still keep his grasp upon the resignation he feels slipping from him. It's she who's getting it away from him. I've done all I could to help him, to give her no opportunities to make him see what he tries so hard not to see. But she makes it more and more clear in spite of me, and in spite of Charles, Mr. Rennie."

"You depict her as pretty brazenly forward, Miss Orbison."

But the sturdy Englishwoman was just. "No," she said. "Those things are different nowadays—customs have changed and anyhow, you see, it's rather chivalrous of her. I don't think she understands much about Charles; she doesn't know his time is so short; but she sees that he's a cripple and wouldn't ask anybody to marry him. She does the courting because of that and because she wants to make the sacrifice. I haven't a doubt she'd eagerly and happily devote her life to nursing him,—indeed I think she'd do anything for him. And she must do something for him, Mr. Rennie. She must!"

"What do you want her to do?" he asked.

Miss Orbison rose. "I want her to let my brother die in peace, Mr. Rennie. Will you ask her? Will you

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 make it clear to her? I've tried—but I couldn't even begin; I'd have done nothing but cry if I'd tried to go any further with her. Will you do it, Mr. Rennie?"

In return, he asked her a question as serious. "Do you think it's possible for anyone to make such a thing clear to a girl of twenty-one in love?"

Miss Orbison looked up at him desperately. "We've got to try, haven't we? Will you try?"

"Yes," he said. "I'll go this afternoon."

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E WATCHED her short, strong figure as it descended the long flight of steps that separated his garden terraces and led to the green doorway. When she had gone out, he could see her gray felt hat below the top of the wall as she strode on toward the old gates and the town; and he sighed for her and the stout heart she carried so bravely in her stout body. Then he sighed for himself and the disturbing errand she had set him upon, and went indoors to change his clothes.

When he came forth again, he paused at the top of the steps. The point was high, and commanded the immense sweep of that great crescenting mountain coast. Below him the gray road wound out of the towered and cubed and angled stone masses of the town, and passed toward the vast corrugations of the volcano's buttresses; there were stolid hamlets built of old lava among the convulsive shadows of these harsh slopes; and halfway to the nearest there was a haze of dust upon the road. It was moving toward

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 Raona, and within it there were glints of glitter and colour. Rennie distinguished the uniforms of mounted carabinieri. He stood looking down as they drew nearer, and he saw that two of the carabinieri rode in advance of a mule cart, with three others riding upon each side of it and two more just behind. Following them, a dozen or more men joggled along upon mules or donkeys, and a straggling little crowd of barefooted peasants ran in the dust—attendant spectators anxious to miss nothing.

Looking down from above, Rennie could see, upon a mattress in the cart, a bandaged figure; and seated upon a stool beside it, a man in gray linen clothes smoked a cigarette. The American recognized him as a friend of his, a Raonese surgeon. Moreover, beside the driver sat a priest.

Rennie ran down the steps, and, as this cortege passed, he detained one of the runners, a villager whom he knew.

"Luigi! For what reason so much excitement? Who has been hurt?"

Luigi wiped his wet brow with a bare forearm. "An accident," he said, panting. "An accident of a peculiar appearance, it might be thought. This morning some of our people found Don Arturo Liana lying

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 at the foot of the Salto. The Salto is a very bad little cliff—it is little but wicked, and foreigners should not use that path."

"Liana!" Rennie exclaimed. "Was he badly hurt?"

"Yes, badly. His mother was sent for and she came with the priest, the carabinieri and the doctor from Raona, four hours ago. She has gone ahead in her automobile and they are taking him to the hospital in the cart because he must be kept lying down. Don Arturo talked to the carabinieri and to the doctor; I heard him myself, through a window. He told them he was walking to a meeting at Castrogirone last night, all alone. Ah! I think he should have been more careful! He said he met some men on the path, but in the darkness he could not tell who they were; he said perhaps they had too much wine. Don Arturo is a brave fellow; I willingly say as much as that for him. He is a foreigner from the North; but he understands the customs of our country and of course he would not tell the carabinieri who pushed him off the path."

"So!" Rennie said. "Who did push him off the path, Luigi?"

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 irises. Pushed,' signore! Who spoke of any pushing?"

"You did."

"No, no!" Luigi protested. "When a man has such enemies as those belonging to Don Arturo Liana, no one is foolish enough to say the young gentleman was pushed from anywhere! Excuse, signore!"

Rennie let him go and he ran away, his brown bare feet flitting lightly over the gray dust. He had caught up with the ragged end of the procession before it passed through the gates; but the American went more slowly. Inside the town, he walked first to the wine shop of old Onorati, who had the habit of knowing the truth of whatever happened in Raona; but of course Onorati would not speak plainly to a foreigner of Don Arturo's fall from the Salto.

"Some will swear one way; some will swear another," he said. "The only thing it is safe to swear is that Don Arturo ought not to have walked so far alone after the dark!"

"No," Rennie returned dryly. "That is evident."

"Evident? Perhaps. He is in politics."

"So? You think it was political?"

"Who can say? Somewhere there was a whispering" Onorati stopped, and shook his head.

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 "Yes? What was the whispering?"

"It could not be true, I am sure; but there was some foolish whispering that Don Arturo had talked a little recklessly of some gentlemen; but I heard nothing that would permit me to guess who the gentlemen are."

"What had he said of them?"

"Nobody knows."

"To whom did he talk?"

Onorati rubbed his right cheek and then his left cheek. "Ah, yes! I remember hearing that it might have been to some foreign ladies at the convent."

By the "convent" he meant the hotel that had been a monastery, and Eugene Rennie, on his way there, stopped halfway down a flight of stone steps, and made a sound as of a dolorous kind of laughter. Then he questioned himself upon this very sound. "Why the devil will a man do that?" he asked himself. "How is it that one is able to see something grotesquely humorous even in a tragedy? In this one, probably because the character of the heroine makes it a tragi-comedy—with the emphasis on the first half of the word, I'm afraid. Avanti, then, for my own miserable part in it!"

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 in the garden, and Rennie went there at once to find her. Miss Orbison had just brought her brother out to his chair. He was standing, leaning upon the back of it, and beside him was the American girl. Miss Orbison had paused with an unfolded rug hanging from her hands; and all three of them wore the pained and incredulous look of people who have just heard startling news. This, in fact, was their condition, for the Princess Liana stood facing them.

Rennie halted where he was.

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HE was naturally a pale woman, of a uniform whiteness of complexion that Rennie, who was an old friend of hers, had never seen varied; but he saw a variation now. Her whole face showed colour; it was flushed to a tint between rose and rust; and she held this emotional face high, too, with her chin lifted and her slim neck straight upon her slim straight body. She was speaking to Claire in a loud voice.

"My son send me," the princess said. "I would not have come myself. They wish' to give him an opiate for his suffering; but he say to me he will not take it if I will not promise to come to speak to you immediately. So I speak to you his message. He wish' me to tell you that what has happen' to him is from politics. He say you mus' not think there was any other cause. He say you might be afraid there was some other reason; he say you mus' not belief so. That is what he send me to tell you and I have told you, Miss Ambler; so now I will go back to him."

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 "Oh—please!" Claire cried. "Will you let me go with you? Would he let me see him?"

"No!" the princess answered sharply. "You could not see him. What do you think? A man all beaten and crush' wish' to be coquetted with? I would not let you see him, Miss Ambler. You have made him unhappy enough and you have done him harm enough; I hope from the deeps of my heart that he will never in his life see you again!"

She turned quickly, and as she walked toward the doorway of the hotel, she came near Rennie. He stepped forward, and she gave him her hand.

"We are not going to let him die," she said. "They have already promise' me that."

"I heard you say Arturo was beaten"

"He was. When they finish', they threw him down from the Salto. Everyone know' who is responsible. But there will be no court. Arturo has some friends who know very well what to do!"

Then, with a sombre flash of her dark eyes to his troubled blue ones, she went on; and he joined the group at the invalid's chair.

Claire was weeping. "You know it's true!" she said accusingly to Orbison. "Anybody with any intelligence at all knows he wouldn't have sent that

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 message to me if he'd believed it himself! She didn't believe it! She made it plain enough, didn't she? She meant that her son sent me that message because he wanted me not to be so wretched as I would be if I thought I'd been the cause, and to make me understand that my name wouldn't be involved. Didn't she mean just that? She made it plain enough how she hates me, didn't she? Yes! And you're making something else pretty plain, Mr. Orbison!"

"I?" Orbison leaned more heavily upon the chair. "What am I making plain?"

Claire came close to him, facing him; she disregarded the others. "You know!" she said. "You've thought from the first I was getting him into trouble. You said so, and you as much as said I was a little fool. You did!"

"No—I"

"You did!" she said passionately. "You thought it! You've thought all along that I was nothing but a little fool and now you think it's proved! That's what you're making plain to me, Mr. Orbison, just as she made it plain how she hates me! Do you think I don't see it?"

Orbison answered her sharply. "There's a rather badly smashed young man down yonder in that

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 hospital on the road to the sea," he said. "It seems to me you might be more concerned with him than with other people's opinion of you."

Claire stepped back from him so quickly and awkwardly that it was almost as if she staggered, while her right arm and shoulder oddly made a semblance of the gesture of one who strives to shield his head from harm. And with that she began to weep aloud. "Oh!" she said. "I see! You hate me for—for not wanting you to think I'm just a little fool! Well—all right!" She began to walk away; but she did not go all the distance to the hotel doorway. She stopped, came back toward Orbison; and, in a broken voice, pathetically sweet, like that of a quietly sobbing child, "I don't care!" she said. "You—you did like one thing about me. I never meant to tell you, but you did like one thing I did. I did it for you. You said—you said it gave you the—the loveliest moment in the—in the greatest hour of beauty you'd ever known. It was—it was I that sang at the Greek theatre for you. And anyway, you did say—you did say you liked that!"

Then, her slender shoulders heaving with the sobs that came faster and more convulsively as she went, she ran to the doorway and disappeared within that

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 portal of the ancient house of refuge from the world.

Miss Orbison helped her brother to let himself down into his chair, where he reclined, sighing, with a hand over his eyes; but immediately she made a sign to Eugene Rennie, and walked to a little distance.

"I thought what you promised me might not be necessary," she said hurriedly, as the American joined her. "I thought the poor foolish little thing had done it herself and saved us the trouble, when Charles spoke to her like that. He did make it pretty plain that he saw how absurdly self-centred she was, I must say! I thought then there might be no need for you to speak to her; but since she told him she was the person who sang at the Greek theatre, I'm afraid you must do it. He's talked of it again and again; nothing in his life ever made such an impression on him as that voice, and now he knows it was hers—well, I'm afraid you must go ahead, Mr. Rennie. You'll try to make her understand?"

"Yes," he said dejectedly. "I suppose so."

He waited an hour; then he went to the door of the cell used as a salon by Mrs. Ambler and her daughter, and knocked.

Claire was there alone.

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 "My poor dear child," he said as he came in. "Do you think you could stand a lecture on invalids and what's good for them—from a fellow countryman?"

She looked at him gently. "My mother's been wanting us to go away," she said. "That's what you mean, isn't it?"

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HE little salon was between the two bedrooms, and both mother and daughter slept with their doors open, because of a nervousness Mrs. Ambler felt about her heart. This was an organ without defect; but she was ill-persuaded of its soundness, and customarily spoke of various indigestions she had suffered as "heart attacks." She was apprehensive of such an attack coming upon her in the night, and wished to be able, even with a voice stricken possibly almost to a whisper, to summon her daughter.

Thus, that last night of theirs in Raona, Mrs. Ambler not only could have spoken to Claire in little more than a whisper, but she could also hear a sound as small as that from her daughter's room; and, waking suddenly, toward morning she did hear such a sound. She listened for a little while; then she spoke.

"Claire, are you awake?"

"Yes."

"Are you crying?"

"No."

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 "It sounds like it."

"Well, I'm not," the daughter insisted.

"I shouldn't think you would," Mrs. Ambler said. "I should think you'd be glad to leave a place where they do such awful things as those ruffians did to poor young Mr. Liana. And you needn't cry over him, either. He's perfectly certain to get well."

"I told you I wasn't crying."

"I think you're very foolish. You know you adore Paris."

"I'm not crying!"

"Very well," Mrs. Ambler said. "How long have you been awake like that?"

"Like what?"

"You know perfectly well what I mean. For heaven's sake, stop that crying and try to get some sleep!"

Claire's voice became petulant. "Please let me alone, Mother!"

Mrs. Ambler sighed and let her alone. No one else could have known in the morning how desolately her daughter had wept, most of the night. Above all, no one would have guessed such a thing of Claire at noon when Miss Orbison came for her and took her to the invalid's cell to say good-bye to him.

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 He sat by the open window listening absently to the talk of his friend Rennie; the air out over the garden beyond them was bright with the strong spring sunshine; but nothing anywhere was brighter than the eyes of the American girl as she came in and gave them greeting. She was charming, in her lively Parisian travelling dress of blue silk, as knowingly scant as any other of her dresses; her slim and rakish black slippers glittered below the fine long shapes of silk stockings that left some doubt of their being stockings at all; her silken blue helmet disclosed just two small curved glints of her fair hair before her hidden ears; and at her waist she wore a cluster of diminutive fresh pink roses.

She spoke first to Rennie: "So sweet of you to send me these!" She touched her bouquet as she sat down between the two men. "The nicest possible bits of Raona one could take away! I'll keep them, Mr. Rennie; and when you come to New York, some day, if you want a reminder of your lovely garden here, I'll show them to you."

"Dear me!" Orbison said. "That's another advantage owning a villa gives a chap over one who merely sojourns at a hotel—a villa can have a garden. There isn't a florist in Raona, unfortunately."

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 "Mr. Orbison!" Claire laughed. "I'll remember you without your sending me a going-away corsage!"

"I hope so."

"You know darn well I will!" she said gayly. "I've certainly been brazen enough in showing you the devastating impression you made on me from the first. I've really pursued you in the most unmaidenly way, and I'm afraid I'd keep right on doing it if we were going to stay any longer. Fortunately for you, my mother's been simply dying for weeks to get back to Paris, and yesterday evening she reached such a climax of rebellion she just broke my spirit and I gave in. Lucky for you, I did!"

"No," he said. "I don't think that's very lucky for me, Miss Ambler."

"What? Not even after the scene I made yesterday afternoon because you scolded me for something I darn well deserved to be scolded for? You don't think you're lucky, even after that?"

"No," he said slowly. "Not even after—anything!"

For an instant, as he said this, she looked startled; then she laughed. "Well, then I'm the lucky one to be going, Mr. Orbison."

"Why?"

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 "Well, you see," she answered merrily, in the manner of a little belle who coquettes with her grandfather, "if I stayed much longer I might be getting too serious about you! Just think how far it's gone with me already!"

"Has it?"

Has it!' Dear me! Didn't I confess to you yesterday I sang the Pastorale that night at the Greek theatre absolutely for you? I did! Absolutely! If you don't believe me, you can ask my mother. I told her when I came home that night; and this is the honest truth, Mr. Orbison. I said, 'That nice Mr. Orbison was there and he hasn't taken the trouble to meet us; I think maybe he would if he knew I sang the Pastorale just to make him! And with that her laughter tinkled out in childlike merriment. "But it didn't make you. After all my trouble! If I hadn't eavesdropped when you were talking to your sister I'd never even have known you liked it at all!"

Liked it, he repeated. "I'm glad you eavesdropped, because you know what I felt about it better than if I'd said the same things to you. It was the most beautiful thing that's ever been in my life; and it remains that, Miss Ambler, as long as I have any life. I hope you'll always remember my"—he fal-

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 tered, then finished huskily—"my gratitude for it."

Then, though only during an instant, her eyes wavered from their careless-seeming gayety. There was a flickering in her expression as of some portended sharp change in it; but the instant passed. "Well, I'm glad," she said; and she flashed to him the side-long insouciant glance, merry and brilliant, of the confessed coquette admitting the worst of her coquetries and impudently claiming the worst of them to be pretty. "Of course Arturo Liana was with me there, and he felt a little gratitude, too, Mr. Orbison!"

Orbison's troubled expression altered into something like a wondering dismay; but he contrived to laugh. "Everybody was grateful. You mustn't think I took so beautiful a thing as that all to myself just because you said it was!"

Claire seemed to be as light-headed as she was light-hearted. "Murder! What I said? My mother tells me, I don't know how many times a day, that if I had to be held responsible for everything I say, I'd be guillotined! But don't you think I didn't mean a great big part of it, for you, Mr. Orbison; I did, honestly! Honestly, I thought of you while I was singing it and wondered if you liked it, and that's true anyhow, absolutely!"

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 She jumped up briskly and put forth her hand to Miss Orbison. "Good-bye. If you ever do come to New York, remember, you've promised on your word of honour to let us know. Mr. Rennie"

"I'm going to be at the station," he said. "We'll say good-bye there."

"How lovely of you!" She turned to Orbison, and he took her extended hand in his cold long fingers. "Good-bye," she said cheerfully. "You've been absolutely sweet to Mother and me; I'm going to read Plato and everything. I hope you won't forget us quite."

"No," he murmured. "I'll never"

"You're lovely to say so," she said. "We won't forget you either. I never will, Mr. Orbison. Good-bye—and thank all of you for everything!"

Her cheeriness continued till the door had closed upon her and the continuously accompanying sound of half-laughter with which she expressed her high cordiality. But Rennie thought her voice had shaken a little when she said, "I never will, Mr. Orbison"; and Orbison himself, as he sank down upon his chair, had a disturbing impression that her hand had trembled within his loose and feeble clasp.

He sat staring out of the window, while his friend, watching him, thought the look upon his face the

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 most deeply puzzled, and yet the most melancholy, he had ever seen upon it. Eugene Rennie's own look, as Orbison did not observe, was one of growing doubt and sharp compunction—the look of a man who finds himself involved in what he fears may prove to be, in the end, a grave mistake.

Miss Orbison had no such expression. She was serious, but not doubtful; and she began briskly to talk casual commonplaces with the anxious caller.

He stayed with them half an hour longer; then got to his feet, saying that it was time for him to be on his way to the station.

Orbison, who had not spoken since Claire left the room, turned his head and stared vaguely at his departing friend.

"We didn't find out, Eugene," he said.

"Didn't find what out?"

"We didn't find out what was in that pretty little head. And now we'll never know; but I'm sure—I'm sure"

"Yes?"

"In spite of all her lightness and her self-centred youthfulness" Orbison paused again; then he said, "I'm sure it was something fine and sweet—in spite of anything!"

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HE station at Raona is by the water, and the road down from the great cliff to the sea level is one that in a photograph seems to be an interminable gray ribbon strewn back and forth upon the landscape. Rennie drove down in a donkey cart he owned, and he was late. When he arrived upon the platform the passengers were all aboard and the train was slowly beginning to be in motion. He looked up and down the length of it, disappointed.

"Mr. Rennie! Mr. Rennie!"

Claire had seen him, and she called loudly from the open window of a wagon-lit compartment.

"Mr. Rennie! Here, Mr. Rennie!"

He looked again, then catching a glimpse of a waving hand, saw framed in the open window the face he sought. Upon it were the glistening streaks of heavy tears; but her eyes were wide and staring with an anxiety more poignant than her grief. The train was moving faster.

"Mr. Rennie!" she screamed. "Mr. Rennie!"

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 He ran toward her, and for a few seconds maintained a pace as rapid as the train's. She leaned from the window and seized his uplifted hand.

"Did I get by with it?" she gasped.

"Yes! God bless you!" he cried, and their hands were parted swiftly.

He stood at the end of the platform and waved his white handkerchief to her; but in a moment, as she looked back, his receding figure dwindled and grew tiny, as if he were a mechanical toy at the end of two long, converging horizontal rods—a little doll man, diminishing and waving a doll's white handkerchief. Above him the vast and broken blue landscape climbed into the sky, and a hazy curve of the cliff disclosed the gray monastery set upon its precipice. Thin as a spider's guy lines, the garden railing ran at the edge, and tiny dark figures stood there, the size of exclamation points. "Ah, good-bye!" Claire cried. "Good-bye . . ."

Her mother pulled her back into her seat. "Do you want to get your head taken off?"

"It seems so strange," Claire said, and uselessly applied a soaked handkerchief to her eyes and nose. "It's so strange, Mother. I don't understand it!"

"For heaven's sake, stop crying! It only makes

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 you talk as if you had a cold in the head. What don't you understand?"

"It's so strange there'll be people there—in that garden—year after year—just as we were. They'll come there and never know anything happened there. . . . There'll be people there, looking down over that cliff at the sea a hundred years from now. It's so strange"

"Yes, of course there'll be people there," Mrs. Ambler said. "Probably a thousand years from now; they were there a thousand years ago, and three thousand for that matter. It's an everlasting sort of place. Do you think it does any good to cry about it?"

But she knew what her daughter was crying about, and her sharpness was tactful. She said no more, but took up a book and read, apparently paying no attention to anything else. Claire was silent, sitting motionless, and, as the afternoon waned, her mother, glancing at her almost imperceptibly, saw that her eyes were dry. She was pale, but her breathing was quiet and not troubled by the little starts and catches that had beset her during the first hour of their journey.

The train stopped at the seaport town of Castro-

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 vecchio; and when it went on again they heard American voices in the next compartment—voices of a mother and her son, it became evident. A little later, a youth of twenty-four or thereabouts appeared in the corridor, lounging, enjoying a cigarette and looking out of the window opposite the Amblers' open door. He was tall, of an athlete's figure, comely of face, well-advised in dress, and his air was that of a carefree and generally amused person. After a time his observation wandered, and he was aware of the girl sitting in the compartment outside of which he took his pleasure. His awareness of her, indeed, was vivid, almost fervent. He looked full ready to be cordial.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "Does my smoking annoy you?"

"Not at all," Mrs. Ambler assured him.

"Are you sure?" he asked earnestly. "Does it annoy you in the least?"

"No. It doesn't come into the compartment; it blows the other way."

"Well, I'll be glad to throw my cigarette away," he said. "I will if it annoys either of you." He looked anxiously at Claire and added: "Are you sure it doesn't annoy either of you?"

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 Claire did not even look toward him.

"Well," he said, still hopefully earnest, "if you're sure you both don't mind it"

At that, Mrs. Ambler was a little amused with him and a little embarrassed; then, looking at her silent and motionless daughter, she was stirred by a faint anxiety. Claire's eyes, staring straight before her at the wall of the compartment, seemed to express a dangerous hostility.

"No, no! Neither of us minds it at all," Mrs. Ambler said hastily; whereupon, after coughing and murmuring, "Well" he moved away. They heard him speaking a few minutes later when he had rejoined his mother. The train had stopped at a village, and in the silence his voice, though not loud, was more audible than he knew. "Americans, yes. Frostiest looking girl I ever saw!"

He was not wholly discouraged, however; for after they were in motion again, he reappeared in the corridor, and the two ladies were conscious that upon the slightest sign to indicate they knew of his existence he would offer them the entertainment of conversation. Mrs. Ambler timidly considered offering the sign; but a glance at her daughter dismayed her.

"See here," the mother said, when the young man

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 had again been frosted into a departure. "I hope you aren't going to keep this up too long, Claire."

"Keep what up?"

"Now, now!" Mrs. Ambler protested. "There wouldn't be anything out of the way in letting that good-looking boy talk to you. He seems very nice indeed, and as he and his mother are probably going all the way through, I don't see" She paused. "It might help you to get out of yourself a little."

"I don't want to be got out of myself."

"Now, now!" Mrs. Ambler said again, and she smiled, though not unsympathetically. "You don't think this is going to last, do you, dear—at your age? How long do you suppose it will be before you'll be interested in seeing something of pleasant young gentlemen again?"

"I never will," Claire said. "Never."

"But if only on your own account you ought"

"No," Claire interrupted. "On their account is what I mean."

"Good gracious! You haven't become precisely poison to gentlemen, my child!"

"Yes," Claire said, in a dead voice. "That's all I am."

Her mother urged no more, and the unhappy girl

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 sat staring frozenly at the polished wall before her. Her thoughts were long and sorrowful, and after a while they became bitter, as well. The persistent youth returned once more to the corridor, and although he affected a manner of interest in his cigarette and the landscape, she was unable not to be conscious of his ever-hopeful consciousness of herself. "Idiot!" she thought, addressing him. "Miserable sleek-haired little idiot! Thinking your awful prattle could be endured for an instant! Haven't you got eyes?"

She blamed him fiercely for not seeing her as she pictured herself to herself. In the autumn she had seen Clothilde Berin, the Parisian actress, play an abysmal tragedy. Mlle. Berin was a tall black-and-white woman with gloomy black eyes under black brows, and, in the final scene of the drama, she sat, in black mourning, staring hollowly straight before her, over the heads of the audience, into an eternity of pain. And thus, to Claire, it seemed now that she herself appeared. She forgot her charming little dress, her pinkish gray stockings, her jaunty blue hat, and even her roses from Raona. What she imagined the young man in the corridor would see—if he had eyes!

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 —was a long, black-haired, black-eyed, black-clad woman with a dead white skin, staring forever before her. Couldn't the idiot recognize a tragedy when he saw it?

Then, with horror, she realized that her two natures were in conflict again; the tricky and malicious artist was at work within her even now, when she was in the midst of the deepest suffering she had ever known. In spite of her true anguish, she was thinking of herself as picturesque; and she was indignant with a cub of a boy, whom she had never seen before, because he did not perceive how picturesque she really was! And thus she reached the bottom of her despair. "No wonder I do such harm!" she thought. "My very soul is artificial—and hideous!"

But at night she lay in her berth in the train that still sped roaring northward—endlessly northward—and the desperation of her will to return was so great that, conscious of her own absurdity, she entreated the iron tracks beneath her to change their course, curve backward and bring her again, in the morning, to Raona.

"I've got to go back," she whispered to the soggy little pillow. "Ah, I want to see him again! I'll only

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 just look at him. They'd let me do that, wouldn't they?"

Then she knew what she had given up. The morning could not bring her to Raona but it need bring her no despair of her soul. The artist within it had behaved not so badly, after all.

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HE endless processions of automobiles, with black tops shiny in an autumnal drizzle, filled the long avenues of Manhattan, and, creeping busily between quivering halts, were like armies of beetles on the march through gloomy ruts in wet stone. Not unlike detached smaller beetles upright and gesticulating to the greater were the traffic directors in gleaming black oilskin, while other imperious coleoptera stood at the awning entrances to apartment houses, and, as the electric lights came on in the late afternoon, outlined themselves in dark wet glitterings that became flashingly active when automobiles drew to the curb. At such times there seemed to be a deposit of larvae; the hard and darkly shining sides of the cars opened, emitting plastic beings to be taken in charge, apparently, by the attendant beetles at the awning ends, and, upon the fashionable avenues, the larvae were of a superior, tenderer kind;—delicate things, exquisitely swathed, they were

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 handled sweetly and hygienically with deferential white gloves.

This is not to say that the deference was anything more than a hopeful sale of so much manner for proportionate pourboire. The giant beetle at the awning of the Abercrombie Apartments on Park Avenue had in his heart no true deference for the larvae deposited with him, though they were among the most richly and softly wrapped in all that thoroughfare. "Tea!" he said mockingly to an official friend, who paused beside him in a relaxed interval. "They call it 'tea'! If you'd see 'em comin' away from all these 'teas,' about an hour or so from now, you'd like to get hold of a little of that kind of 'tea' yourself, Charlie."

The policeman laughed admiringly. "Cost about eight dollars a quart from a bootlegger, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, and more. It's a shame," the doorman said bitterly. "You'd be surprised how much of it they get away with. Yes, and even young girls! It's the worst waste we've ever had in this country. Now before prohibition" But here he interrupted himself; a French automobile drew out of the traffic to halt by the awning; he stepped forward cordially and opened the door. "Yes'm," he said, not replying to any inquiry. "It's a nasty afternoon. Very nasty, in-

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 deed, ma'am, and it looks like a nasty evening, too. Yes, ma'am, indeed it does so!"

The policeman glanced with a favourable interest at the emerging figure; for he knew that his friend spoke so freely of the weather to only those whom he regarded as important clients. This one, moreover, had every appearance of being such a client; she presented to view the slender elegance, completed, not immature, of a gracefully experienced young lady of the world, and, better still, she was to be distinguished from previously arriving clients by something even more ingratiating than her superior comeliness. Most of the others, too much like larvae, came out of their cars in a dead-eyed coma; apparently they had to be passed inside the building and relieved of their swathings before being roused to complete consciousness;—this one was already brilliantly alive; her blue eyes were twinklingly aware of everything and took note of both the doorman and the policeman as fellow-beings worthy of cognizance.

"Mr. Winge tells me he thinks it may be the climate, William," she said to the former. "Mr. Winge is almost sure the climate has something to do with the weather."

The policeman was charmed with her. "They ought

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 to make more like that one," he said, when she had gone briskly into the great, lighted doorway. "Who was she talkin' about? Her husband?"

"No; she ain't married. This Winge is only a dumb-bell lives here her and I joke about. He ain't got no chance with her at all."

"I hope not," the policeman said. "You'd hate to think of one like that marryin' a dumb-bell. About how old is she, you think?"

"Miss Ambler?" the doorman returned thoughtfully. "Well—prob'ly somewhere around where either they marry a young feller or else don't, and wait a while and marry a man that's lost his wife."

"Is she so?" his friend said, amused. "I expect from her looks, though, she don't feel no great call to be troublin' her head over that!"

But his surmise was not at all a correct one: Miss Ambler had been troubling her head about that a great deal of late. In fact, at this very moment, in the elevator of the Abercrombie, she was almost acutely troubling her head about it and she had some special promptings to painful thought upon the subject. The least pressing of them, it may be explained, as a key to her present state of mind, was the fact that

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 a previously patient suitor had delivered an ultimatum: he was to have a favourable answer by nightfall of to-day or he would henceforth treat her as a stranger, none of her proposed middle-grounds being possible for him. She found herself able to endure the prospect of his alienation; but a more serious matter was involved: she was twenty-four, which is bearable;—what began to take her breath was the imminent approach of her birthday. She had only a fortnight left; then she would be twenty-five.

Here was a disturbing numeral. For a girl the difference between twenty-four and twenty-five has a disproportionate importance. In certain uncomfortable suggestions it may be equal to the difference made by a whole decade in the life of a young man: for her, the difference between twenty-four and twenty-five may be what the difference between twenty-five and thirty-five is for him. In Claire's mind, at twenty-four, there was a Rubicon before her; and to cross over, unwed and even unbetrothed, into twenty-five, was almost crossing over into a definite spinsterhood. Or, if it were not crossing into a spinsterhood so definite as to be absolute and permanent, it was crossing into that period of limbo wherein a maiden waits, ageing, until perchance she marries the relict widower of a

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 former girl-friend and brings up children not her own. The doorman had defined Claire's age shrewdly enough.

She had shivered a little upon leaving twenty-three for twenty-four, as if at the touch of an October breeze in August; yet autumnal gayety was easily possible for twenty-four. Twenty-four was not so bad of itself; its sinister quality resided in its border, and, as she approached nearer and nearer that border, she more and more often incredulously murmured the dread numeral to herself, wondering and dismayed to find it upon her lips.

"Twenty-five!" she thus whispered in the elevator. "Twenty-five!"

The elevator man did not hear her. What he said was only a coincidence; her apartment was upon the eighteenth floor. "Eighteen, Miss Ambler?"

"Twenty, Henry, please."

He nodded affably. "Mrs. Allyngton's, I expect. She seems to be having quite a tea this afternoon. Quite a tea at Mrs. Allyngton's this afternoon, Miss Ambler." And he added, in an admiring tone, though his purpose was merely to make a little more conversation with this favoured resident: "I was pretty sure you wouldn't miss it, Miss Ambler. I told Joe; I said

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 'She'll be back here in time for it,' I said. 'You'll see,' I said. 'She ain't goin' to let 'em leave her out when there's anything going ''on! ' '' I told him, 'Not Miss Ambler!' I told him."

His passenger made the appreciative murmur of laughter required by genial manners; but as she stepped out upon the twentieth floor she was less pleased than she appeared. "Twenty-five!" she whispered again. But it seemed that even before twenty-five was actually reached, a girl had to exert herself to keep people from leaving her out. Her exertions must be somewhat noticeable since they roused the admiration of the elevator man.

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N A corner, and a little apart from the general hilarity of Mrs. Allyngton's "tea," Claire sat asking herself why she made the exertions. At almost twenty-five, she was able to occupy her mind seriously with this puzzle and at the same time to produce the amount of chatter necessary to prevent the two gentlemen attending her from suspecting that either she or they were less lively than the liveliest of the party. Simultaneously she could take stock of everyone in the place, observing swiftly how well or ill such a one was "looking"; who talked to whom; how Mr. So-and-So's flirtation with Mrs. Thus-and-Thus progressed; what every woman wore and that the painted table Mrs. Allyngton had added to the "Regency treatment" of the apartment was probably spurious.

Most of the women present were young wives about Claire's age; some of them were several years younger; two or three were a few years older; and she had known nearly all of them in their previous state of

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 candidacy for the matrimonial condition. They had passed out of the preparatory period, and she hadn't; so that her relation to them was a little like that of a student, still in school, to former classmates who, after a thrilling Commencement, have become graduates gloriously preoccupied with their new world. Companion initiates in an experience superior to hers, they seemed to have fulfilled their destiny, and to be at last properly and completely alive; while she, avoided by this common, happy destiny, was left outside, not yet really alive and never to be, indeed, if that destiny should still avoid her or she reject it. The latter alternative was the kinder, and already she knew that some of these friends were beginning to say of her: "It isn't for lack of asking."

She was still with them but no longer of them, though they were obviously as fond of her as ever. They were always pleased to have their husbands dance with her; and she foresaw that as the years went by they would find an "odd man" for her whenever they could. At present she was still almost too amply able to supply the "odd man," herself; and here she felt another difference between her condition and that of the graduates: it seemed to her that in spite of their superior advantages she understood

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 men—even the husbands of some of her friends—better than they did. Apparently, marriage often involved a kind of blindness.

One of the men now chattering with her, over his third cocktail, was in reality, Claire thought, a total stranger to his wife, a pretty woman twittering with a group at Mrs. Allyngton's piano. This man had tried to kiss Claire the first time he found himself alone with her, and the only reason he hadn't tried again, she knew, was that she had thereafter successfully avoided being alone with him. Two or three of the other men present, she had cause to be aware, would do the same thing if she gave them half a chance to hope that they could "get away with it." Another, an immaculate fat man, had annoyed her with confidential witticisms of double meaning until she stopped him. These were but sporadic indications of the nature of the beast, as she realized; but they certainly meant something; and her deduction was that most men were grosser and more predatory than their wives suspected. Without effort, she attracted men—attracted them sometimes to her own discomfort; but, in general, and as a woman, she believed that she did not really like them.

She attracted men, but she no longer attracted

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 boys; she had been through the experience of perceiving that. With her mother, she had returned to the Maine coast for the past two summers, and had found herself "too old" for the Beach Club dances. A person of fifty, seeing her beside one of the girls who prevailed at these dances, could not have decided which was the elder: to his eye Claire showed not any outward sign at all of her maturity; but the dancing boys knew instantly that she was "too old" for them. Youth has its own divinations; and, for these boys—some of them her own age—Claire was already an "old girl."

"Twenty-five!" she thought, now, biting again upon this sore tooth. Twenty-five would make her an "old girl" indeed; but it should not make her marry. She knew well enough why these women at Mrs. Allyngton's had married these men. Some of them had married in a kind of contagion because they were of the marrying age and because "all the rest" were getting married. Some of them had dallied, then married almost in a panic, grasping at anything as they saw "twenty-five," or worse, approaching; she had been a bridesmaid for "old girls" thus frantically marrying and had shed tears, really of rage, for them.

Angered but vague, she supposed the whole affair

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 of marriage to be "something probably biological." The young had to get out of the nest: the boy learned to forage for himself; but the girl's part was ignominious: she had to find a forager—and ride him! A whole epoch in a woman's life was devoted to the competition, the struggles against her companions to obtain a forager;—hysterically affecting gayety all the while, she must scramble and fight to get him, never letting him perceive that it wasn't he who did the scrambling. The elation of newly engaged girls had sometimes made Claire sick with pity for her sex: it seemed to her that what she read in the roseate look of the maiden betrothed was, "I've got mine!"

Having got theirs, they were generous to Claire: they wanted her to get hers, though she needed no forager and could still choose which one of several she would take, if she wished. She had been fortunate enough to have the foragers scrambling for her, indeed; and what she was resolved to resist was the contagion: she was bitterly resolved not to be married because "all the rest" were married or getting themselves married. Almost despairingly, she asked for a better reason.

A dozen of "all the rest" were here in Mrs. Allyngton's apartment, this afternoon, and, as she looked at

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 them, she wondered that such a contagion could reach her from them; for undeniably she felt it. She was intimate with them, and several of them still thought of her as "best friend"; but the intimacy was merely habit, she perceived—a habit sprung from chance propinquities and parental associations. She and these best friends of hers had shared experiences: they had stepped together into the arena and had formed the intimacies of a band of young gladiators. When they found themselves pitted against one another they had fought according to their own code, though most of them had half-forgiven some rather tricky wounds;—but what Claire had come more and more keenly to realize was that she had little true congeniality with any of them. Why then did she bore herself by remaining intimate with them? Why did she still make exertions not to be "left out"? Why on earth had she bothered to come here this afternoon?

For Mrs. Allyngton's "tea" was only the daily "cocktail party." The "conversation" was but the noise that mechanically grew louder and less coherent as the chemical action of gin inevitably operated the mechanical action of vocal organs. Daily these people met somewhere to put themselves through these

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 same chemic mechanics: they seemed to need to drug themselves in order to bear one another's society, and since they were as dull as that, Claire thought, what wonder their lives were as chemic mechanical as their parties! Well, why in the world did she still go to the parties?

She couldn't answer her own question; but she was certain that she hadn't come, this afternoon, because Walter Rackbridge would be here. Mr. Rackbridge was he who had delivered the ultimatum expiring at nightfall of this same day, and the last person with whom she desired to hold converse. Yet here he was, a comely, thin, dark bachelor of thirty with a haggard eye; and, upon his arrival in Claire's corner, the two attendant gentlemen at once intelligently went forth to riot mildly in other regions. She was left tête-à-tête with him and in an unhappy mood.

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OU'VE decided," he said immediately. "Which is it, Claire?"

She shook her head, looking at him sadly. "Thoughtful of you, Walter, to ask me that—here!"

"Isn't it?" The young man's face, not hopeful before she spoke, became gloomier; for correctly he assumed that what she said was an unfavourable portent. "I suppose you think I might have been more tactful to inquire by telephone?"

"No," she returned, and she laughed ruefully. "My idea of tactful is that you'd have made no inquiry at all."

"I see. I should just have let it run on, remaining your undemanding servant forever. Well, I'm afraid tact will have to go by the board."

"I dare say. And you with it, Walter?"

"If you send me by the board with it, yes."

She shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, no! I'd never send you. That's in your own hands: if you go it's because you want to."

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 "Claire," he said quietly, "I think you've told other men just that same thing. Probably some of them have been weak enough to keep on hanging around rather than incur the kind of reproach you imply."

"What 'reproach'?"

"That they didn't care enough for you to be content with your liking them. That's a pretty old story, it seems to me, and so far as I'm concerned it's not helpful. I think you're the cruellest person I've ever known, Claire."

"Do you?" she said; and her expression, as she looked wearily away from him, caused his own to become one of desperation.

"Yes, I do—banal as you think me for saying so." He was not altogether successful in stifling an actual groan; it became audible, and that there might be no doubt of his suffering, a dew, not of the heat, appeared upon his forehead. "You've been genuinely brutal to me almost from the first," he said. "You're the most adorable thing in this world, and you know perfectly well that any man in his senses must see that you are. You knew at the very start that I thought so; you didn't care at all for me and yet you deliberately made yourself as enrapturing to me as

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 you could. You've always done that: you're doing it even now at the very moment when you intend to tell me I've got to give up my last hope of you."

"Now?" she asked scornfully. "What am I doing now?"

"You're looking your most beautiful!" He laughed painfully. "You couldn't even bring yourself to the decency of dressing unbecomingly or in any way looking less charming—and I couldn't possibly find a more damning thing to say of you."

"Oh, dear!" she murmured. "I think you've said this to me several times before, Walter."

He caught his breath; then he said quietly, "Yes, the only novelty about this is that it's the last time. Don't think I'm unaware of the answer you're going to give me. It's 'no.

She continued to look away from him, and did not speak.

"Isn't it?" he said, in a voice a little tremulous, after a silence. "Isn't it 'no'?"

She turned and looked at him with a sorrowful gravity. "I told you more than a year ago that I could never be in love with you, Walter. You've been pretty nice to me and you know well enough how much I like you. I like to be with you—when you're

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 sensible enough to be just friendly—and I like to hear music with you: I even like spending several hours at a time with you—again when you're just friendly. Well, that's all, and I can't help it. You say it's not enough, and I can't help that, either. You say I've got to promise to marry you or you'll take yourself permanently out of my orbit. Very well, I'm not going to be married merely for the sake of being married."

"And if you married me," he said gently, "that's all it would be?"

She was sorry for him; he was miserable, and she knew that he had cared for her, truly and well, a long time. Moisture appeared in her eyes. "Yes, it would," she said. "I'm sorry I ever let you get started, Walter. That was my fault, it's true; because I could have stopped you; but I hadn't learned enough to do such things then. I confess to you that I wanted to charm all the men I could. There—I'm letting you see what I've really been like; it ought to be useful to you."

"Useful!" he groaned. "It only makes me see that you're lovelier than ever—for owning up to it." He took a step away, as if to leave her; then turned back. "Well—nothing's likely to make any difference for me? It's all over, is it?"

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 "Unless you'd like it to stay as it is."

"I can't," he said. "I've tried; but I've either got to win you or leave you—and I can't win you. Well" He contrived to form the semblance of a smile. "Good-bye—dear."

"Good-bye," she said, in a low voice; and to her sudden surprise she found this parting sharply painful: she had expected to be relieved, not hurt, by it. She put out her hand impulsively. "Good-bye—dear!" she said in little more than a whisper.

At that, he started and looked at her intently; but she released her hand from his, said hastily, "No! Just good-bye!" and, crestfallen, he turned away.

He did not go far. Their hostess was already upon them, convoying a middle-aged gentleman and a girl of eighteen; and before Walter could evade this anti-climax, Mrs. Allyngton had seized him by the arm. "I was just coming over to break up the tête-à-tête," she said. "Miss Ambler, this is Mr. Sherman Peale. Walter, this is Miss Peale. There's some music coming and you can dance with her pretty soon, and in the meanwhile be witty for her. You can, sometimes, you know! Claire, I'm going to leave Mr. Peale with you; that's what he wants."

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HAT was what Mr. Sherman Peale wanted, as Claire already understood. He was a grayish, meagre man with a brown face and alert bright eyes that had seen a great deal, but were as lively and unjaded as those of his eighteen-year-old daughter who now turned aside with the unhappy Walter. Claire catalogued Mr. Peale as an "interesting" man, for which rating she had previous information from the public prints. He was an exploring anthropologist and had just returned to face batteries of interviewers after a long immersion in the steamy jungles of the Orinoco, a river of apparently no interest to him at the present moment. With a breath-taking clarity he explained what did interest him.

"I saw you the moment my daughter and I came into this room, Miss Ambler," he said. "Yours was the one face that stood out, and I knew you were the one person here I wanted to know. I've been living entirely among savages for several years and I'm

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 afraid I've thus relapsed into a habit of primitive frankness of speech lost by our own race some thousands of years ago. Can you stand it?"

"I think perhaps," she said, "I can even equal it."

At that, his youthful eyes glinted forth sparklings of pleasure. "Well, suppose you give me a sample of your own."

"Of my own frankness?" She laughed, and then, with a light audacity, she said, "I saw you as you came in, Mr. Peale, and humbly hoped for a little notice." And, though she should have blushed to say it, this was the mere truth: she had observed the advent of the distinguished gentleman, and had instantly thought, recognizing him, "There's a man I'd like to know!" The reason she should have blushed was that this thought of hers had been in her head during her rejection of Walter Rackbridge: the unfortunate Walter might well have been entitled to all of her thoughts for those few crucial moments. But no one had quite all of Claire's thoughts at any moment whatever; she was never wholly free of that "double" sense of hers, that curse of "seeing" herself as somebody else, even when she truly suffered. And thus, even while she had rejected Walter and had said to herself of Sherman Peale, "There's a

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 man I'd like to know," she had simultaneously been her own audience, seated aloof and observing the actress. Moreover, as audience, she had said: "Walter goes. That brown-faced man coming in and looking at me, could that be He?" And she had let the brown-faced man become aware for an instant of her eyes upon him; so here he was—of course!

"You'll get the notice, Miss Ambler," he said, delighted. "I hope you can stand it as well as the frankness."

"I think I can. Has it begun?"

"Decisively!" he rejoined; and he went on at once: "After a man has been cut off a long time from his kind, he comes back to them as a lonely stranger. My wife used to go with me upon my expeditions; but since her death I've gone alone. Coming back to New York has seemed to me the loneliest of all my expeditions, though it might surprise you to hear me say so, Miss Ambler. I've moved among crowds of people ever since I landed, two weeks ago; I've been obliged to make speeches at science association dinners—even at other dinners. I've been in a whirl of lunches and parties and reporters and celebrities; I've even danced until three in the morning. Yet I've never felt so alone in my life; it may be nostalgia

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 for swamps and savages, but I don't feel that I've been in actual human contact with a fellow-being since I left South America. When I saw you I had a queer thought, and as you say you can stand savage frankness, I'll tell you what it was. I thought, "There'sthought, 'There's [sic] someone who would understand me."me. ' " [sic]

"It might be overestimation," Claire said. "But how could you feel quite so alone with a daughter like that to go about with you?"

"Kitty? Good heavens! To me she's the greatest stranger of all. I left her a little schoolgirl of fourteen in her aunt's charge, and I've come back to find a curiously sophisticated adult person whose very vocabulary is less open to me than that of some primitive tribes who express themselves principally in grunts and squeals. Bless me! I'm afraid I shall never become acquainted with Kitty. That good-looking youth with her now already knows more about her, I haven't a doubt, than I ever shall."

Claire's eyes followed his glance to where his daughter sat with Walter; and to the girl of almost twenty-five Miss Kitty Peale was no such mystery as her father found her. She was a slim little fair creature, exquisite peach-bloom in a knowing small gray hat, an amber-coloured blouse and skirt, the latter

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 perhaps eighteen inches long, pale yellow silk stockings naturally much in view, and beautiful amber shoes from the Rue St. Honoré—superb small works by an artist in footwear and worth preserving in a collection. She was not inappreciative of them, herself, and, as she chattered to Walter, sometimes slightly elevated one or the other of them, bestowing a momentary glance of thoughtful pleasure upon it from beneath her lovely ashen lashes. Her stockings pleased her, too, undoubtedly; though she frequently tweaked the little skirt down to cover part of a knee-cap. She had many such little fluttery and impulsive gestures, and her voice was also fluttery and impulsive. She uttered laughter and little outcries as of surprise throughout her talking, so that she seemed continually to have an obbligato accompaniment of mirth and wonderment.

"Ah, me!" Claire thought. "That's just what I was like, then. Poor Walter!"

But, to her surprise, as she glanced at him, Walter seemed less downcast than she had expected. His equanimity was the more puzzling to her because she could hear perfectly what the child was loudly prattling to him. "So you're actually Charlie Rackbridge's cousin! I know him awf'ly well, really! I

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 think he's perfectly peachy wonderful—just as a boy in college, I mean of course. I went down to both the games he played in before he broke his collarbone; but of course I'm not wildly collegiate; Charlie's peachy in his own place, I mean! I never dreamed I'd meet a cousin of his this afternoon." Here she looked wistfully for one second into Walter's eyes; then, with an air of mockery, tapped his arm with the tips of her fingers. "And such a cousin!"

"She's a terrific little belle, I'm afraid," her father said to Claire. "She has a squadron of boys hanging about and seems to spare no one. She tells me she prefers 'older men,' and I suppose she means young gentlemen about as old as the one she's proceeding to enthrall just now. I haven't a doubt she'll annex him before she leaves his side and will probably tell me, after we go out, that she has an engagement with him for the evening. She'll break several previous ones, incidentally, but she'll patch all that up later somehow. I'm sure I don't know how she does it."

Claire thoroughly knew how Kitty did it; and she shivered slightly, remembering how she herself had done it. "There, but for the grace of God in making me almost twenty-five, walk I!" she thought; and then hearing what Kitty said next, she was startled.

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 "I saw you the minute I came into the place," Kitty chirped loudly. "And I wondered right away who you were."

At this, Claire perceived that in one detail, at least, even the grace of God had not granted to twenty-five any superiority over eighteen. Kitty was beginning with Walter just as her father and Claire had begun with each other. "Good heavens!" the girl almost twenty-five said to herself. "Did I do it like this at eighteen? Am I still doing only the same things I did then—endlessly repeating them as long as I can stay in the ring?" And, dismayed, she wondered if there was any real difference between her present situation with Mr. Sherman Peale and Kitty's with Walter Rackbridge. Hadn't Kitty probably asked herself, at first sight of Walter, "Is this He?" She indeed probably had! And just as Claire was already certain that if she chose she could make Mr. Peale take any amount of interest in her she thought desirable, wasn't the eighteen-year-old girl capable of a like certainty in regard to Walter? "Not that Walter would," Claire thought; and then, hearing his response to Kitty's overture, she had another surprise.

"I'm glad you wondered," he said gravely. "I

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 think I'd like to be wondered about—by you—very much."

Claire stared at him incredulously, for he seemed to mean what he said; and she remembered how quickly desolated gentlemen are caught, sometimes, on the rebound. This thought disturbed her, not because she was at all a dog in the manger, or could be jealous of another's seizing upon what she, herself, rejected, but because she had a liking for Walter that was almost a fondness, and she admired him. His native talent and a genius for work had made him one of the best young architects in New York; he was kind, generous and able—a man much too good to be caught on the rebound by an eighteen-year-old bit of peach-bloom. And here Claire consoled herself with a difference between eighteen and twenty-five. "Never a thought in that little head except about herself—not one! She's making poor old Walter believe she's thinking of him; but eighteen can't think of anything except itself. The poor thing ought to know better than to trust her—she might actually marry him! Such things have happened often enough."

Ah, that peach-bloom! Dangerous to any man of

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 any age, if it wished to be Claire knew. Peach-bloom! Alas—twenty-five!

The explorer was speaking to her. "There's another thing I'd like to ask you if you can stand."

"Well then, ask me. I'll answer you."

"I'm asking because of my loneliness," he said seriously. "You see, a civilized thinking man is naturally lonely among savages, no matter how much he may find to interest him. Well, I discovered long ago that he can be quite as lonely in civilized quarters of the world, and I've just been making a re-discovery of that uncomfortable fact. The truth is that I'm a peculiar man; I've never been at all like anyone else I've ever known, and, naturally, as queer a person as I can't expect many people to understand him, nor can he hope to find many true companions. Yet that's what I've yearned for all my life, understanding and companionship. I'm as abrupt as I am frank, Miss Ambler; I always make up my mind about people at my first glance and I've already told you I saw understanding in your face. What I want to ask you is if you think you could stand seeing something of me. Do you think you could?"

She laughed. "We might mutually have some burdens to bear, if I could, Mr. Peale."

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 "No," he said, leaning toward her earnestly. "I'm serious. Perhaps I'd better tell you a little about myself." And with this he began an autobiography that seemed to Claire to be one of perfect candour yet strongly favourable to its subject. Half an hour later, when musicians had begun to play in the next room, Mr. Peale's memoirs had not reached his adult period. Nevertheless, in spite of his naive self-absorption, Claire did not consider him a fiasco; the narrative was vigorous and undeniably interesting; moreover, she saw that she had no further need to exert herself. All she had to do was to listen with a deeply understanding expression and, if she did this often enough he would presently wish her listening to be continuous. Before they parted, to-day, he would ask her how soon he could see her again: she set his proposal of marriage—if she chose—at about a month in the future; less than that—if she chose. But she did not choose; for already she knew the brown-faced man was not He. There was no He; no true mate awaited her or ever would come out of space to claim her—twenty-five was all that claimed her!

She jumped up to the first dancer who presented himself, and departed from Mr. Peale with a word of apology so quickly spoken that he had no opportunity

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 to ask her when he might continue his narrative. He meant to "cut in," and hovered in the offing, waiting to do so; whereupon, finding herself swept near a door, she said hurriedly, "That's all; I'm going home," slid from her partner's arms and out into the hallway. But just as she effected this evasion, Miss Kitty Peale dancing near her with Walter, was claimed, and left him for another.

Kitty somewhat recklessly allowed it to become evident that she was reluctant to make the exchange, and as she was borne onward her eyes lingered upon her previous partner.

"Don't forget," she called sweetly. "Eight-thirty to-night."

And Claire, as she went toward the outer door of the apartment, heard Walter's response, a single word: "Forget?"

The incredulity he expressed was sufficient.

"Idiot!" Claire said reminiscently, as she waited for the elevator; and when she had reached her own apartment, and, after a dexterous avoidance of her mother, was in her own room, she said "Idiot!" again.

She looked at a little clock of lapus lazuli and gold upon a table, and sat down before a mirror to remove

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 her shoes: she must undress, then dress for a dinner. "Dress, undress, dress, undress!" she murmured wretchedly, half-aloud. "Undress, then dress again. And what the devil is it all about?"

She had taken off one shoe; she held it in her hand and sat staring at it, her head bent over it, until she noticed a tiny drop of water upon the shining black surface of its long, curved heel;—a tear had fallen there without her being aware of it in her eye.

She hurled the pretty shoe across the room, so that it struck noisily against the wall. "Oh, my gosh!" she whispered in sharp despair. "Twenty-five! I can't stand it and it can't be stopped! Nothing in the world can stop it! Twenty-five!"

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HE had been twenty-five for a month and a week; it was bearable as is everything that must be borne; but it was still incredible. "My twenty-sixth year!" she said to herself. "That's the same as the twenty-seventh—or twenty-eighth" And she thought of herself as "outside of life" now, forever. "I've chosen not to live," she thought. "What's the difference between that and suicide?"

Her mother had gone to a concert; Claire was alone in the apartment and she stood at a window, from this high cliffside looking forth upon tower and abyss illumined by the prodigious night flares. The new skyline, staggering with the new sky-scrapers, rose even above her, overwhelming the stars with the blatant giantism of the new New York. She felt its huge provincial commonness, its stupendous materialism and its frantic magnificence; but in the main it seemed to her a Titanic honeycomb of lighted cells, with open doors through which flitted hordes and hordes of girls breathlessly hungry for the approval of men

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 who sat in the cells appraising stodgily, or, roused by some cunning appeal, succumbing to it with repulsive flaccidity. Yet all these were ephemera; sky-scrapers, hungry girls and the men they sought already partook of the dust they would soon become. She had learned how suddenly the quicksilver years run out, carrying youth and life itself with them.

She turned from the window, took up a book and sat down with it in an exquisite but comfortable Louis Sixteenth chair. "What on earth is this stuff?" she inquired petulantly when her eye, not her mind, had read a paragraph blindly the third time. Then she left the book upon the chair, went to the "concert grand" piano, and sang half of a song in her rich and moving voice; but she stopped in the middle of a note; her hands dropped from the keys. Frowning, she rose and began to pace the floor.

"I ought to have gone out," she said aloud. "I don't believe I should be alone to-night. I feel as if I might be going to do something crazy."

Then, upon the instant, she did the thing she feared she might do. She went to the telephone and called Walter Rackbridge at a club. He was there; his voice indicated surprise when she let him know who spoke to him, and it was significant that she had to let him

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User:Beleg Tâl/Sandbox/Confederate broadsides

 * ✅ A New Source of Niter
 * ✅ Awake in Dixie
 * Battle Song of the "Black Horsemen"
 * Beauregard at Manassas
 * Camp Song of the Maryland Line
 * Cotton is King
 * Country, Home and Liberty
 * Dear Liberty
 * General Davis
 * General Forrest
 * Give Our Flag to the Breeze!
 * God Help Kentucky!
 * God and Liberty!
 * Graves for the Invaders
 * Hark! O’er the Southern Hills
 * Hurrah for Dixie!
 * Hurrah for Jeff. Davis
 * In Memoriam: Herbert Warren
 * Kelly’s Irish Brigade
 * Lines Sacred to the Memory of Capt. Henry C. Gorrell of Greensboro’
 * Lines on the Death of Lieut. Gen. T. J. Jackson
 * Lines on the Death of Major Gen. E. Van Dorn
 * Lines on the Death of the Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston
 * Lines on the Proclamation Issued by the Tyrant Lincoln
 * Manassas (Clark)
 * Maryland (c. 1862 printing)
 * My Maryland
 * New-Year’s Address of the Carrier of the Patriot & Mountaineer
 * North Carolina. A Call to Arms!!!
 * Our Happy Land of Canaan
 * Our Land of Dixie
 * Patriotic Song
 * Rally Around the Stars and Bars!
 * Rally Round the Standard Boys
 * Rejected Address!
 * Remember Bull’s Run
 * Reply to the Volunteer Zouave
 * Sallie May and The Sentinel’s Dream of Home
 * Song. Maryland in Fetters
 * Song—Virginia
 * South Carolina, A Patriotic Ode
 * Southern Song of Liberty
 * The Confederate Flag, Red, White, & Blue
 * The Confederate Flag
 * The Confederate Soldier's wife
 * The Dead of Alabama
 * The Drummer Boy of Shiloh
 * The Flag of Secession
 * The Georgia Volunteer
 * The Glorious Southern Victories!
 * The Happy Land of Canaan
 * The Last Race of the Rail-Splitter
 * The Last Request
 * The Lone Star Camp Song
 * The Maryland Martyrs
 * The Merry Little Soldier
 * The New ConstellationThe Confederate Flag
 * The Rebel’s Retort
 * The Soldier’s Prayer and The Only Plea
 * The Song of the Drum
 * The Song of the Rebel
 * The South and North
 * The Southern Flag
 * The Southern Girl with the Home-Spun Dress
 * The Southern Girl’s Song
 * The Southern Marseillais
 * The Southerner’s Departure
 * To Miss Harriot Pinckney
 * To Mrs. Rosanna Osterman
 * To the Beloved Memory of Maj. Gen. Tom Green and To the Memory of Col. Thos. S. Lubbock
 * To the Memory of Jackson
 * Yankee Stampede


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 know this. For the first time he failed to recognize her voice.

"Are you busy just now?" she asked, with some sharpness.

"No, not for an hour or so. I have an appointment later. Why?"

"I thought if you cared to come and see me"

"You mean now?"

"Yes, if you"

"Why of course, if you wish," he said politely. "I'll be there immediately."

He was there within ten minutes, in fact, and when he came in, still obviously surprised, he found her seated in the pretty chair and apparently reading. She looked up languidly; then, as he sat down, facing her, she murmured a word of thanks for his coming. "Good of you to be so obliging, Walter."

"Not at all," he said cordially. "You wanted to see me about something?"

Her eyes opened wide with the full look she gave him then. "I'm not sure," she said slowly, "that it's necessary to add 'about something.

He was mystified; plainly so. "You wanted to see me?"

"Yes."

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 "What about?" the simple creature inquired.

At that, she looked away and shook her head ruefully; but made no reply.

"Ah" he began uncomfortably. "I suppose you—I haven't seen you since—well, I suppose you wanted to talk to me about something."

"Is it inconvenient for you to be here?"

"Not at all. I have to turn up at a party after the theatre."

"You 'have to'?" she asked. "You mean you promised to? You mustn't let me keep you."

"There's plenty of time," he assured her, and then, in silence, waited for her to explain why she had summoned him. No explanation appeared to be forthcoming; she sat looking before her at the fireplace where above a nether ruddiness small blue flames wavered upon the anthracite coal; but she did not speak, and appeared to have settled definitely into this brooding contemplation. More and more puzzled, he continued to wait, until it began to seem to him that he was engaged in a form of endurance contest. If he was, he failed to win it, for finally, after coughing slightly several times, he said, "Oh—by the way" then stopped.

"Yes?" she said. By the way'—what?"

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 "I've been seeing quite a little of Sherman Peale lately and I've wondered if you appreciate what an extraordinary person he is."

"What?" she said lifelessly. "Oh, yes; I believe I do. Why?"

"He doesn't think so," Walter explained. "He's rather mystified by your treatment of him, though I'm sure you haven't meant to be rude."

"Rude?"

"Hasn't he written you twice asking when he could see you?"

"Yes. Three times. Another note came to-day 'in case the others had miscarried,' he mentioned."

"And you haven't answered any of them? I imagine he's a little taken aback."

"Do you?" she asked, still gazing absently at the fire. "How did you find all this out? Did Mr. Peale tell you?"

"No. His daughter told me. She was secretly terribly amused, and laughed about it. I'm afraid she doesn't take her father very seriously?"

"No," Claire said. "What does she take seriously?"

"I'm not sure. Why?"

"Because there's only one thing she can."

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 "Only one thing she can take seriously? A person, you mean?"

"Yes," Claire said; and now, as she spoke, she turned her head and looked at him with a clear and friendly regard. "I hear you've been everywhere with her lately and by this time you probably feel that you know her pretty well. Don't you?"

"Why, yes; of course."

Claire shook her head. "You don't. Nobody does. She doesn't, herself. She last of all, indeed!"

"You think so?"

"I know so," Claire said quietly. "She's eighteen. I know what I was like at eighteen and it's what I've been more or less like ever since, until I found twenty-five coming down on me. Of course I was a little less like eighteen with every advancing year, yet sometimes I feel that I've only lately quite got over being Miss Kitty Peale. Well, you see, I know her, and she's not good enough for you, Walter."

"Why, what"

"Wait a moment. A girl of eighteen can't take you seriously; she can't take anything seriously, except herself; she can't think of anything except herself. It isn't her fault; she doesn't know how. She can't

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 be in love with anyone but herself; and that isn't her fault, either; she merely doesn't know how. All she can actually see is herself. She wants to have everybody in love with her that she can possibly get into that condition; but she really doesn't understand that her lovers are human beings, her fellow-beings—not even when she singles one out and believes that she adores him. It's only another way of adoring herself. I've really given you more feeling, just as your friend, than Kitty Peale is capable of giving you, even if she should let you marry her. I'm giving you so much friendship at this very moment, Walter, that I dare take the risk of asking you if you couldn't see her as she is, for your own sake, and cease to be one of her squadron. Her father told me she has a 'squadron' of boys about her. They'll content her and they won't get much hurt, but you might—especially if she should decide she wanted you to marry her."

Walter stared, and his colour heightened visibly. "See here," he said. "Do you mean you're advising me to stop seeing her?"

"Yes. I take that risk."

"I think you might very well call it a risk!" he said bitterly.

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 "I'll define it if you like," she rejoined, giving him a wan and rather wavering smile. "I told you I would never take you myself and I never shall. I know now that I'll never be married—never—not ever at all, Walter. And since I won't take you, myself, you want to know how it gets to be my affair that you may wish to marry someone else. How dare I warn you to keep away from another girl, against whom there's nothing in the world to be said except that she's in the very perfection of the peach-bloom age? Well, I do warn you, because I know what trouble I made for a few boys and men when I had that age, myself, and I dare the risk of what you'll think of me for my warning. You'll very likely only think me a jealous dog in the manger." She rose suddenly, went to the other end of the room and stood with her back to him. "Well, if you care to think it, go ahead and think it!"

"What do you want me to think?" he asked, not moving from his chair.

"Anything you like!"

His reddened brow was corrugated by a frown of reflection; he shook his head ruefully, baffled, and then he was startled for she turned and spoke sharply to him.

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 "That's all I have to say. I think you'd better go."

"Go?" he repeated, and his bewilderment was so great that he could only inquire, feebly, "Go where?"

"Back to your club," she said angrily. "Or to keep your engagement with Miss Peale. Or anywhere you like!"

He got up and came to her. "What is it you want me to do, Claire? Do you mean that though you won't have me you're advising me not to marry anybody else?"

"Good heavens!" she cried. "Would that be so hard for a man? Plenty of women bear it. Couldn't you?"

"I don't see why I should," he said. "There's no reason in the world why I shouldn't marry if I wish to. Why shouldn't I now—if I wish to?"

"You poor goose!" she cried. "Because you'll only be marrying on the rebound after I refused you! Because you'll only be falling for peach-bloom that'll be gone forever in an hour or so! Because you'll have been caught by a self-centred little monkey's knowing how to say 'The first time I saw you I wondered who you were!' Wait till you find a woman who can take some interest in you for yourself and not in your

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 merely being in love with her! Then marry her, marry her as quickly as you can, in heaven's name!"

"But if I should never find her?"

"Well, couldn't you bear it?" she said fiercely. "I bear it! Couldn't you?"

"Never marrying?"

"Don't you know how much easier that is for a man? Don't you understand—don't you see" Then, without warning and almost to his horror, for he had never seen her weep, she dropped down upon a sofa and burst into tears. "Don't you know," she sobbed, "don't you know that for a woman it's the same as suicide?"

He sat beside her and took her hand; but she jerked it away. "Let me alone!" she cried. "I told you to go! I want to be left by myself."

In high distress he rubbed his forehead. "Look here," he said. "This is terrible; I've never seen you like this and never dreamed you could be. What's the matter?"

"Nothing, I tell you, if you'll just go!"

"But there is something the matter," he insisted thoughtfully. "Your nerves are probably to blame and you oughtn't to let them get unstrung like this. You ought to"

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 But, crying out, she interrupted him. "Ah! Will you please go back to your club before you tell me to see a nerve specialist?"

"All right; if you want to be let alone, I'll go." And with that, he rose and went decisively toward the door; but paused before he reached it. "You knew that when one girl asks a man not to let himself be carried away by another girl he's likely to think her merely jealous, didn't you?"

"Oh, glory!" Claire groaned. "I told you I took that risk knowingly."

"It's a long time—a long, long time"—he said, and his voice had become a little tremulous;—"It's a long, long time since you cared to have me in love with you. But you take enough interest in me now for myself to risk anything I might think of you."

"What?" she said in a low voice; then she lifted her head from between her two hands where it had been drooping; and with wet, wide eyes, she stared at him. "What?" she repeated more loudly; and a third time she said the word, louder still. "What?"

He came and stood before her. "You care enough for me on my own account to take that risk. How much more do you expect to care for anybody?"

Startled, disturbed to the depths of her being,

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 wretched, yet vaguely illumined by what at first seemed a mirage of happiness, she rose and moved as though to put a greater distance between them; but after one step away, she halted—she put a gentle and trembling hand softly upon his shoulder.

"I don't know," she said uncertainly. "I don't think I ever could know. Do you think it's enough, dear?"

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T ABOUT twelve o'clock on the night before her wedding, Claire came into her room, and, after locking the door, went to a chest and took from it a large oblong case of stamped brown leather. She set it upon a chair beside the chest; then, after a moment of frowning, sank down upon the floor beside the chair and opened the leathern case. It contained various objects, now worthless, and she took them out, one by one, and dropped them into a waste-basket that stood beside the chest.

There were some packets of letters, tied with narrow ribbons; there were a few withered flowers, singly and in little clumps, and there were ribbons that had been tied about bouquets of orchids, of roses, of violets; there were college pins, scarf pins, a green silk handkerchief, a club hat-band, and sheafs of photographs. Most of the photographs were of the heads of young gentlemen; but some were of groups of boys and girls together; and in most of these a younger Claire appeared. There were "snapshots"

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