m there to meet Carrie. Then
the other complications of love, desire, and opposition possessed him.
His thoughts fled on before him upon eagles' wings. He could hardly wait
until he should meet Carrie face to face. What was the night, after all,
without her--what the day? She must and should be his.

For her part, Carrie had experienced a world of fancy and feeling
since she had left him, the night before. She had listened to Drouet's
enthusiastic maunderings with much regard for that part which concerned
herself, with very little for that which affected his own gain. She kept
him at such lengths as she could, because her thoughts were with her own
triumph. She felt Hurstwood's passion as a delightful background to her
own achievement, and she wondered what he would have to say. She was
sorry for him, too, with that peculiar sorrow which finds something
complimentary to itself in the misery of another. She was now
experiencing the first shades of feeling of that subtle change which
removes one out of the ranks of the suppliants into the lines of the
dispensers of charity. She was, all in all, exceedingly happy.

On the morrow, however, there was nothing in the papers concerning the
event, and, in view of the flow of common, everyday things about, it now
lost a shade of the glow of the previous evening. Drouet himself was
not talking so much OF as FOR her. He felt instinctively that, for some
reason or other, he needed reconstruction in her regard.

"I think," he said, as he spruced around their chambers the next
morning, preparatory to going down town, "that I'll straighten out that
little deal of mine this month and then we'll get married. I was talking
with Mosher about that yesterday."

"No, you won't," said Carrie, who was coming to feel a certain faint
power to jest with the drummer.

"Yes, I will," he exclaimed, more feelingly than usual, adding, with the
tone of one who pleads, "Don't you believe what I've told you?"

Carrie laughed a little.

"Of course I do," she answered.

Drouet's assurance now misgave him. Shallow as was his mental
observation, there was that in the things which had happened which made
his little power of analysis useless. Carrie was still with him, but not
helpless and pleading. There was a lilt in her voice which was new. She
did not study him with eyes expressive of dependence. The drummer
was feeling the shadow of something which was coming. It coloured his
feelings and made him