sudden fury.

"Why, certainly, dearest--only I don't see what has produced this change
in you."

"I have not changed--you have changed."

He laughed at this. "The woman's last word! Well, I admit it. I have
come to love you as a man loves the woman he wishes to make his wife.
I'm going to care a great deal, Elsie Bee Bee, if you do not come to me
some time."

"Don't say that!" she cried, and there was an imploring accent in her
voice. "Don't you see I must not wear your ring till I promise all you
ask?"

They walked on in silence to the door. As they stood there he said: "I
feel as though I were about to say good-bye to you forever, and it makes
my heart ache."

She put both hands on his shoulders, then, swift as a bird, turned and
was gone. He felt that she had thought to kiss him, but he divined it
would have been a farewell kiss, and he was glad that she had turned
away. There was still hope for him in that indecision.

As for Elsie, life seemed suddenly less simple and less orderly. She
pitied Osborne, she was angry and dissatisfied with herself, and in
doubt about Curtis. "I'm not in love with him--it is impossible, absurd;
but my summer is spoiled. I shall go home at once. It is foolish for me
to be here when I could be at the sea-shore."

After a moment she thought: "Why am I here? I guess the girls were
right. I _am_ a crank--an irresponsible. Why should I want to paint
these malodorous tepee dwellers? Just to be different from any one
else."

As she sat at her open window she heard again the Tetong lover's flute
wailing from the hill-side across the stream, and the sound struck
straight in upon her heart and filled her with a mysterious longing--a
pain which she dared not analyze. Her mind was active to the point of
confusion--seething with doubts and the wreckage of her opinions.
Lawson's action had deeply disturbed her.

They had never pretended to sentiment in their relationship; indeed, she
had settled into a conviction that love was a silly passion, possible
only to girls in their teens. This belief she had attained by passing
through what seemed to her a fiery furnace of suffering at eighteen, and
when that self-effacing passion had burned itself out she had renounced
love and marriage and "devoted herself to art," healing herself with
work. For some years thereafter she posed as a man-hater.

The objective cause of all this tumult and flame and renunciation seemed
ridiculously inadequate