y work," he
answered. "I've broken with my uncle, you know. I'm as poor as a church
mouse and I'll never be better off until I get a play on the stage. For
the next few years I've got to cut out everything but hard work."

"Yes." Her tongue was paralyzed; she couldn't say what she felt, and
everything else seemed to her horribly purposeless and ineffectual. She
wondered passionately if he thought her a fool, for she could not look
into his mind and discover how adorable he found her monosyllabic
responses. The richness of her beauty combined with the poverty of her
speech made an irresistible appeal to the strongest part of him, which
was not his heart, but his imagination. He wondered what she would say
if she were really to let herself go, and this wonder began gradually to
enslave him.

"That's the reason I hadn't any business coming here," he added, "but
the truth is I've wanted to see you again ever since that first
afternoon. I got to wondering whether," he laughed in an embarrassed
way, and added with an attempt at levity, "whether you would wear a red
rose in your hair."

At his change of tone, she reached up suddenly, plucked the rose from
her hair and flung it out on the grass. Her action, which belied her
girlish beauty so strangely that only her mother would have recognized
it as characteristic of the hidden force of the woman, held him for an
instant speechless under her laughing eyes. Then turning away, he picked
up the rose and put it into his pocket.

"I suppose you will never tell me why you did that?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I can't tell. I don't know. Something took me."

"Did you think I came just for the rose?"

"I didn't think."

"If I came for the rose, I ought to go. I wish I could. Do you suppose
I'll be able to work again now that I've seen you? I've told myself for
three days that if I could only see you again I'd be able to stop
thinking about you."

She was not looking at him, but in every line of her figure, in every
quiver of her lashes, in every breath that she drew, he read the effect
of his words. It was as if her whole palpitating loveliness had become
the vehicle of an exquisite entreaty. Her soul seemed to him to possess
the purity, not of snow, but of flame, and this flame, in whose light
nothing evil could live, curved towards him as if blown by a wind. He
felt suddenly that he was swept onward by some outside power which was
stronger than his will. An enchantmen