troubles, patience and constancy."

"No, you've misunderstood me," cried Pauline. "I'm afraid that I hamper
him, that I spoil his work. If I gave him up he would go away from
Wychford and be free. Besides, perhaps then his father would pay his
debts. Miss Verney, Mr. Hazlewood didn't like me, and I think Guy has
quarreled with him over me. Oh, I'm the most miserable girl in England,
and such a little time ago I was the happiest."

"Money," said Miss Verney, slowly and seeming to address her cats rather
than Pauline. "The root of all evil! Yes, yes, it is. It's the root of
all evil."

Pauline was a little heartened by Miss Verney's readiness to consider so
seriously the monster that oppressed her thoughts; yet it was
disquieting to regard the old maid, whose life had been ruined by money,
and who all alone with cats stayed here in this small house at the top
of Wychford town, the very image of unhappy love. It was disquieting to
hear her reflections on the calamity of gold uttered like this to cats,
and in a sudden dread of the future Pauline beheld herself talking in
the same way a long time hence. She shivered and bade Miss Verney
farewell; and now to all the other woes that stood behind her in the
shadows was added the vision of herself mumbling to cats in February
dusks of the dim years ahead.

The idea of herself as the figure of an unhappy tale of love grew
continuously more definite, and once she spoke of her dread to Guy, who
was very angry.

"How can you encourage such morbid notions?" he protested. "You really
must cultivate the power to resist them. People go mad by indulging
their depression as you're doing."

"Perhaps I shall go mad," she whispered.

"Oh, for God's sake don't talk like that!" he ejaculated in angry alarm;
and Pauline, realizing how she had frightened him, was sorry and went to
the other extreme of high spirits.

"I thought we had agreed to wait ten years or twenty years, if
necessary," said Guy. "And now after one year you are finding the strain
too much. Why won't you have confidence in me? It's unfortunate about
Worrall, I admit. But there are plenty of other publishers."

He mentioned names one after another, but to Pauline they were the names
of stone idols that stared unresponsively at her lover's poems.

"If we had only done what Mother wanted and not seen so much of each
other," she lamented.

Guy's disposal of her vain fears was without effect, for his eloquence
could