d now, he seized the
hand that lay in her lap.

"A birthday! Yes, of course, you're twenty-one! Really mistress of it
all now! And you don't know what to do with it, except spoil the
arrangement of the furniture?"

She laughed low and luxuriously. "What am I to do with it?" she asked.

"Well, won't you give it all to me?" As he spoke he laughed and kissed
her hand. "I've come to ask you for it. Here I am. I've come
fortune-hunting to-night."

"It's all mine now, you say? Harry, take it without me."

"If I did, I'd burn it to the ground that it mightn't remind me of you."

"Yes, yes! That's what I've wanted to do!" she exclaimed, drawing her
hand out of his and raising her arms a moment in the air. Addie
Tristram's pose was gone, but Harry did not miss it now.

"Take it without you indeed! It's all for you and because of you."

"Really, really?" She grew grave. "Harry, dear, for pity's sake tell me
if you love me!"

"Haven't I told you?" he cried gayly. "Where are the poets? Oh, for some
good quotations! I'm infernally unpoetical, I know. Is this it--that
you're always before my eyes, always in my head, that you're terribly
in the way, that when I've got anything worth thinking I think it to
you, anything worth doing I do it for you, anything good to say I say it
to you? Is this it, that I curse myself and curse you? Is this it, that
I know myself only as your lover and that if I'm not that, then I seem
nothing at all? I've never been in love before, but all that sounds
rather like it."

"And you'll take Blent from me?"

"Yes, as the climax of all, I'll take Blent from you."

To her it seemed the climax, the thing she found hardest to believe, the
best evidence for the truth of those extravagant words which sounded so
sweet in her ears. Harry saw this, but he held on his way. Nay, now he
himself forgot his trick, and could still have gone on had there been
none, had he in truth been accepting Blent from her hands. Even at the
price of pride he would have had her now.

She rose suddenly, and began to walk to and fro across the end of the
room, while he stood by the table watching her.

"Well, isn't it time you said something to me?" he suggested with a
smile.

"Give me time, Harry, give me time. The world's all changed to-night.
You--yes, you came suddenly out of the darkness of the night"--she waved
her hand toward the window--"and changed the world for me. How am I to
believe it? And if I can believe