o his knees.

"There's no such thing as a successful pretense between us, I know," he
said. "So I'll talk plainly. I'm glad to. I know what it is you miss in
me. It's gone. Temporarily I suppose, but gone as if it had never been.
That's a--physiological fact, Paula."

She flushed hotly at that and looked away from him.

"I don't know exactly what a soul is," he went on. "But I do know that a
body--the whole of the body--is the temple of it. It impenetrates
everything; is made up of everything. Well, this illness of mine has, for
these weeks, made an old man of me. And I'm grateful to it for giving me
a chance to look ahead, before it's too late. I want to make the most of
it. Because you see, my dear, in ten years--or thereabouts--the course of
nature will have made of me what this pneumonia has given me a foretaste
of. Ten years. You will be--forty, then."

She was gazing at him now, fascinated, in unwilling comprehension. "I
hate you to talk like that," she said. "I wish you wouldn't."

"It's important," he told her crisply. "You'll see that in a minute, if
you will wait. Before very long--in a month or so, perhaps--I shall be, I
suppose, pretty much the same man I was--three months ago. Busy at my
profession again. In love with you again. All my old self-assurance back;
the more arrogant if it isn't quite the real thing. So now's the time,
when the fogs one moves about in have lifted and the horizon is sharp, to
take some new bearings. And set a new course by them. For both of us.

"There is one fact sitting up like a lighthouse on a rock. I'm
twenty-four years older than you. Every five years that we live together
from now on will make that difference more important. When you're
forty-five--and you'll be just at the top of your powers by then--I shall
be one year short of seventy. At the end, you see, even of my
professional career. And that's only fifteen years away. Even with good
average luck, that's all I can count on. It's strange how one can live
along, oblivious to a simple sum in arithmetic like that."

She had been on her feet moving distractedly about the room. Now she came
around behind his chair and gripped his body in her strong arms.

"You shan't talk like that!" she said. "You shan't think like that! I
won't endure it. It's morbid. It's horrible."

"Oh, no, it's not," he said easily. "The morbidity is in being afraid
to look at it. It was morbid to struggle frantically, the way I did all
the