has happened to-day?"

"Oh, nothing whatever has happened! and as for ten years hence--well, in
ten years hence I shall be looking back to this day either as one of
the happiest of my life, or as Francesca looked back upon her _tempo
felice_."

"Oh, now that you get into a foreign language you are quite
intelligible. You have not spoken?"

"Spoken? I? To her--to her? I have not spoken. I don't believe that I
shall ever have the courage to speak to her in the sense you mean."

Ella smiled as she settled a rose on the bodice of her evening
dress--its red petals were reposing in that little interspace that
dimpled the soft shell-pink of her bosom. The man before her had once
kissed her.

She smiled, as she knew that he was watching her. She wondered if he had
forgotten that kiss.

"Why should you lose courage at this juncture?" she asked. "She hasn't,
up to the present, shown any very marked antipathy to you, so far as I
can see. She is certainly not wanting in courage, if you are."

"Ella," he cried, but in a low voice, "Ella, when I look at her, when I
think of her, I feel inclined to throw my bag into a trap and get back
to town--get back to New Guinea with as little delay as possible."

"You would run away?" said she, still smiling. She had begun to work
with the rose in her bosom once more. "You would run away? Well, you ran
away once before, you know."

She could not altogether keep the sneer out of her voice; she could not
quite deprive her words of their sting. They sounded to her own ears
like the hiss of a lash in the air. She was amazed at the amount of
bitterness in her voice--amazed and ashamed.

He stood before her, silently looking at her. There was no reproach in
his eyes.

"Oh, Bertie, Bertie, forgive me!" she said, laying her hand on his arm.
"Forgive me; I don't know what I am saying."

There was some piteousness in her voice and eyes. She was appealing to
him for pity, but he did not know it. Every man thinks that the world
was made for himself alone, and he goes tramping about it, quite
careless as to where he plants his heavy feet. When occasionally he gets
a thorn in one of his feet, he feels quite aggrieved. He never stops to
think of all the things his foot crushes quite casually.

Herbert Courtland had no capacity for knowing how the woman before him
was suffering. He should have known, from the words he had just heard
her speak. He should have known that they had been wrung from h