an;
or is it that you are just--going away from me?"

Once more it was as if a trap had been sprung upon her. But this time he
ignored the gasp and the sudden cold slackness of the hands he held and
went on speaking with hardly a pause.

"I asked that question, put it that way, thinking perhaps I understood
and that I could make it easier for you to tell me." He broke off, there,
for an instant to get his voice under control. Then he asked, steadily,
"Are you going to marry Graham Stannard?"

She gasped again, but when he looked up at her there was nothing in her
face but an incredulous astonishment.

So there was one alternative shorn away; one that he had not conceived as
more than a very faint possibility. It was not into matrimony that her
long journey was to take her. He pulled himself up with a jerk to
answer--and it must be done smoothly and comfortably--the question she
had just asked him. How in the world had he ever come to think of a thing
like that?

"Why, it was in the air at Hickory Hill those days before you came.
And then Sylvia was explicit about it, as something every one was
hoping for."

"Was that why you went away?" she asked with an intent look into his
face. "Because he had a--prior claim, and it wouldn't be fair to--poach
upon his preserves?"

He gave an ironic monosyllable laugh. "I tried, for the next few days to
bamboozle myself into adopting that explanation but I couldn't. The truth
was, of course, that I ran away simply because I was frightened. Sheer
panic terror of the thing that had taken hold of me. The thought of
meeting you that next morning was--unendurable."

She too uttered a little laugh but it sounded like one of pure happiness.
She buried her face in his hands and touched each palm with her lips. "I
couldn't have borne it if you'd said the other thing," she told him. "But
I might have trusted you not to. Because you're not a sentimentalist.
You're almost the only person I know who is not."

She added a moment later, with a sudden tightening of her grip upon his
hands, "Have you, too, discovered that sentimentality is the crudest
thing in the world? It is. It is perfectly ruthless. It makes more
tragedies than malice. Ludicrous tragedies--which are less endurable than
the other sort. Unless one were enough of an Olympian so that he could
laugh." She relaxed again and made a nestling movement toward him. "I
thought for a while of you that way."

He managed to speak as