t about anything?"

The fact that her face was still turned away as she asked that question
gave it a significance which could not be overlooked.

"It's perfectly true," he asserted. "I don't believe I could if I
tried. But there's something evidently troubling you. Let's have it.
Oh, don't be afraid. You've no idea what an--Olympian position one
finds himself in when he has got half-way across the Styx and come
back. Tell me about it."

"You know all about it already. I told you the first day you could
talk--that I was going to give up singing altogether except just for
you,--when you wanted me to. I knew I'd been torturing you about it. I
thought perhaps you'd get well quicker,--want to get well more--if you
knew that the torture wasn't to go on. It was true and it is true.
Perhaps you thought it was just one of those lies that people tell
invalids--one of those don't-worry things. Well, is wasn't.

"But you made me promise I wouldn't do anything--wouldn't break my
Ravinia contract--until we could talk it all out together. Your
temperature went up a little that afternoon and when Doctor Darby asked
me why, I told him. He said I mustn't, on any account, speak again to you
about it until you brought the subject up yourself. I don't know whether
he'd call this bringing it up or not, but anyway that's it. I've kept my
promise to you though," she concluded. "I haven't written. They still
think I am going to sing this summer."

"I am very glad of that," he said quietly. "I thought the thing was
settled by our first talk. I didn't realize that you had taken it merely
as an--adjournment."

She was still turned rigidly away from him, but the grip of one of her
hands upon the arm of a chair betrayed the excitement she was laboring
under, while it showed the effort she was making to hold it down.

"I didn't think, though," he went on, "that that resolution of yours to
give up your whole career,--make ducks and drakes of it, in obedience to
my whim--was nothing more than one of those pious lies that invalids are
fed upon. I knew you meant it, my dear. I knew you'd have done
it--then--without a falter or a regret."

"Then or now," she said. "It's all the same. No, it isn't! Now more than
then. With less regret. Without a shadow of a regret, John,--if it would
bring you back to me."

The last words were muffled, for she had buried her face in her hands.

He had heard the ring of undisguised passion in her voice without a