spring, trying to resist the irresistible thing that was drawing
you along your true path. It was a cancerous egotism of mine that was
trying to eat you up, live you up into myself. That, thank God, has
been cut out of me! I think it has. Don't misunderstand me, though. I'm
not going to relinquish anything of you that I can keep;--that I ever
had a chance to keep."

He took her hands and gently--coolly--kissed them.

"Then don't relinquish anything," she said. "It's all yours. Can't you
believe that, John?"

He released her hands and sank back slackly in his chair. "Victory!" he
said, a note of inextinguishable irony in his voice. "A victory I'd have
given five years of my life for last March. Yet I could go on winning
them--a whole succession of them--and they could lead me to nothing but
disaster."

She left him abruptly and the next moment he heard her fling herself down
upon his bed. When he rose and disengaged himself from his rug, she said,
over an irrepressible sob or two, that he wasn't to mind nor come to her.
She wasn't going to cry-not more than a minute.

He came, nevertheless, settled himself on the edge of the bed and took
possession of her hands again.

"I wouldn't have told you all this," he said--"for you don't need any
lessons in arithmetic, child--if I dared trust myself to remember, after
the other thing had come back. Now I'm committed--don't you see?--not to
play the fool, tragically or ludicrously, as the case might be, trying to
dispute the inevitable. And I shall contrive to keep a lot, my dear. More
than you think."

Later, the evening of that same day, he asked her what was in the letter
that had provoked their talk. Did they want her back in Chicago for
rehearsals or consultations? Because if they did there was no reason in
the world why she should not go. At the rate at which he was gaining
strength there would not be the slightest reason--he gave her his
professional word of honor--why she should not go back in a day or two.

"I should have to go back," she said, "if I were going to sing March's
opera. There is such a lot of work about a new production that there
would be no time to spare."

"But," he asked, "isn't March's opera precisely what you are going to
sing?"

"No," she said rebelliously. "It's not. There wasn't anything in the
contract about that. I'll carry out the contract this summer. I'll keep
my word and yours, since that is what you want me to do. But I won't sing