by what you've told me, or because you can't forgive me for not letting
you tell me before?"

"You know which!" she said.

"Well, then, what should you think of some other man if he could care
for such a thing, when some other girl had told it him of herself? You
would think him very unjust and----"

"But it isn't some other man; it isn't some other girl!"

"No, I'm glad it isn't. But can't we reason about it as if it were?"

"No, we can't. It would be--wicked."

"It would be wicked not to. Do you think you ought to break our
engagement because I didn't let you tell me this at first?"

Cornelia could not say that she did; she could hardly say, "I don't
know."

Ludlow assumed that she had said more. "Then if you don't think you
ought to do it for that, do you think you ought to do it for nothing?"

"For nothing?" Cornelia asked herself. Was there really nothing else,
then? She stood looking at him, as if she were asking him that aloud.
He was not so far off as when they began to talk, just after they had
risen, and now he suddenly came much nearer still.

"Are you going to drive me from you because I don't care for all this?"

"You ought to care," she persisted.

"But if I don't? If I can't? Then what is the reason you won't let it
all be as if nothing had happened? Ah, I see! You can't forgive me for
sending you his letter! Well, I deserve to be punished for that!"

"No; I should have despised you if you hadn't----"

"Well?"

She was silent, looking at the floor. He put his arm round her, and
pushed her head down on his shoulder. "Oh, how silly!" she said, with
lips muted against his own.

XXXIX.

Cornelia and Ludlow were married at Pymantoning in the latter part of
June, and he spent the summer there, working at a picture which he was
going to exhibit in the fall. At the same time he worked at a good many
other pictures, and he helped Cornelia with the things she was trying.
He painted passages and incidents in her pictures, sometimes
illustratively, and sometimes for the pleasure of having their lives
blended in their work, and he tried to see how nearly he could lose his
work in hers. He pretended that he learned more than he taught in the
process, and that he felt in her efforts a determining force, a clear
sense of what she wanted to do, that gave positive form and direction
to what was vague and speculative in himself. He was strenuous that she
should not, in the slightest degree, laps