st, I felt a certain
impatience to verify what I knew was a certainty, and hurried to
the telephone booth. I resented the instrument, its possibilities
of betrayal, her voice sounded so matter-of-fact as she bade me good
morning and deplored the rain.

"I'll be out as soon as I can get away," I said. "I have a meeting at
three, but it should be over at four." And then I added irresistibly:
"Nancy, you're not sorry? You--you still--?"

"Yes, don't be foolish," I heard her reply, and this time the telephone
did not completely disguise the note for which I strained. I said
something more, but the circuit was closed....

I shall not attempt to recount the details of our intercourse during
the week that followed. There were moments of stress and strain when it
seemed to me that we could not wait, moments that strengthened Nancy's
resolution to leave immediately for the East: there were other, calmer
periods when the wisdom of her going appealed to me, since our
ultimate union would be hastened thereby. We overcame by degrees the
distastefulness of the discussion of ways and means.... We spent an
unforgettable Sunday among the distant high hills, beside a little lake
of our own discovery, its glinting waters sapphire and chrysoprase.
A grassy wood road, at the inviting entrance to which we left the
automobile, led down through an undergrowth of laurel to a pebbly
shore, and there we lunched; there we lingered through the long summer
afternoon, Nancy with her back against a tree, I with my head in her
lap gazing up at filmy clouds drifting imperceptibly across the sky,
listening to the droning notes of the bees, notes that sometimes rose
in a sharp crescendo, and again were suddenly hushed. The smell of the
wood-mould mingled with the fainter scents of wild flowers. She had
brought along a volume by a modern poet: the verses, as Nancy read
them, moved me,--they were filled with a new faith to which my being
responded, the faith of the forth-farer; not the faith of the anchor,
but of the sail. I repeated some of the lines as indications of a creed
to which I had long been trying to convert her, though lacking the
expression. She had let the book fall on the grass. I remember how she
smiled down at me with the wisdom of the ages in her eyes, seeking my
hand with a gesture that was almost maternal.

"You and the poets," she said, "you never grow up. I suppose that's the
reason why we love you--and these wonderful visions of f