most of a piece of news, perhaps--more likely,
indeed--because she divined that the announcement would not be entirely
agreeable, she delayed it, played with it.

"I have gone into the operating-room."

"Fine!"

"The costume is ugly. I look hideous in it."

"Doubtless."

He smiled up at her. There was relief in his eyes, and still a question.

"Is that all the news?"

"There is something else, K."

It was a moment before he spoke. He sat looking ahead, his face set.
Apparently he did not wish to hear her say it; for when, after a moment,
he spoke, it was to forestall her, after all.

"I think I know what it is, Sidney."

"You expected it, didn't you?"

"I--it's not an entire surprise."

"Aren't you going to wish me happiness?"

"If my wishing could bring anything good to you, you would have
everything in the world."

His voice was not entirely steady, but his eyes smiled into hers.

"Am I--are we going to lose you soon?"

"I shall finish my training. I made that a condition."

Then, in a burst of confidence:--

"I know so little, K., and he knows so much! I am going to read and
study, so that he can talk to me about his work. That's what marriage
ought to be, a sort of partnership. Don't you think so?"

K. nodded. His mind refused to go forward to the unthinkable future.
Instead, he was looking back--back to those days when he had hoped
sometime to have a wife to talk to about his work, that beloved work
that was no longer his. And, finding it agonizing, as indeed all thought
was that summer night, he dwelt for a moment on that evening, a year
before, when in the same June moonlight, he had come up the Street and
had seen Sidney where she was now, with the tree shadows playing over
her.

Even that first evening he had been jealous.

It had been Joe then. Now it was another and older man, daring,
intelligent, unscrupulous. And this time he had lost her absolutely,
lost her without a struggle to keep her. His only struggle had been with
himself, to remember that he had nothing to offer but failure.

"Do you know," said Sidney suddenly, "that it is almost a year since
that night you came up the Street, and I was here on the steps?"

"That's a fact, isn't it!" He managed to get some surprise into his
voice.

"How Joe objected to your coming! Poor Joe!"

"Do you ever see him?"

"Hardly ever now. I think he hates me."

"Why?"

"Because--well, you know, K. Why do men always hate a woman wh