We're both of age--"

"Wait, Hugh; wait." Cynthia's hands were tightly clasped in her lap.
"Are you sure that you want to? I've been thinking a lot since I got
your telegram. Are you sure you love me?"

He slumped back into his chair. "I don't know what love is," he
confessed miserably. "I can't find out." Cynthia's hands tightened in
her lap. "I've tried to think this business out, and I can't. I haven't
any right to ask you to marry me. I haven't any money, not a bit, and
I'm not prepared to do anything, either. As I wrote you, my folks want
me to go to Harvard next year." The mention of his poverty and of his
inability to support a wife brought him back to something approaching
normal again. "I suppose I'm just a kid, Cynthia," he added more
quietly, "but sometimes I feel a thousand years old. I do right now."

"What were your plans for next year and after that until you saw me?"
Her eyes searched his.

"Oh, I thought I'd go to Harvard a year or two and then try to write or
perhaps teach. Writing is slow business, I understand, and teaching
doesn't pay anything. I don't want to ask my father to support us, and I
won't let your folks. I lost my head when I suggested that we get
married. It would be foolish. I haven't the right."

"No," she agreed slowly; "no, neither of us has the right. I thought
before you came if you asked me to marry you--I was sure somehow that
you would--I would run right off and do it, but now I know that I
won't." She continued to gaze at him, her eyes troubled and confused.
What made him seem so much older, so different?

"Do you think we can ever forget Prom?" She waited for his reply. So
much depended on it.

"Of course," he answered impatiently. "I've forgotten that already. We
were crazy kids, that's all--youngsters trying to act smart and wild."

"Oh!" The ejaculation was soft, but it vibrated with pain. "You mean
that--that you wouldn't--well, you wouldn't get drunk like that again?"

"Of course not, especially at a dance. I'm not a child any longer,
Cynthia. I have sense enough now not to forfeit my self-respect again. I
hope so, anyway. I haven't been drunk in the last year. A drunkard is a
beastly sight, rotten. If I have learned anything in college, it is that
a man has to respect himself, and I can't respect any one any longer who
deliberately reduces himself to a beast. I was a beast with you a year
ago. I treated you like a woman of the streets, and I abused Norry
Parke