walked up and down
together.

"Those stars irritate me," he said after a while. "They make me
appreciate that this world's a tiny grain of sand adrift in infinity,
and that I'm----there's nothing little enough to express the human atom
where the earth's only a grain. And then they go on to taunt me with
how short-lived I am and how it'll soon be all over for me--for ever.
A futile little insect, buzzing about, waiting to be crushed under the
heel of the Great Executioner."

"Sometimes I feel that," answered Pauline. "But again--often, as a
child--and since, when everything has looked dark and ugly for me, I've
gone where I could see them. And they seemed to draw all the fever and
the fear out of me, and to put there instead a sort of--not happiness,
not even content, but--courage."

They were near the rail now, she gazing into the southern sky, he
studying her face. It seemed to him that he had not seen any one so
beautiful. She was all in black with a diamond star glittering in her
hair high above her forehead. She looked like a splendid plume dropped
from the starry wing of night.

"The stars make you feel that way," he said, in the light tone that
disguises a compliment as a bit of raillery, "because you're of their
family. And I feel as I do because I'm a blood-relation of the
earthworms."

Her face changed. "Oh, but so am I!" she exclaimed, with a passion he
had never seen or suspected in her before. She drew a long breath,
closed her eyes and opened them very wide.

"You don't know, you can't imagine, how I long to LIVE! And KNOW what
'to live' means."

"Then why don't you?" he asked--he liked to catch people in their
confidential moods and to peer into the hidden places in their hearts,
not impudently but with a sort of scientific curiosity.

"Because I'm a daughter--that's anchor number one. Because I'm a
mother--that's anchor number two. Because I'm a wife--that's anchor
number three. And anchor number four--because I'm under the spell of
inherited instincts that rule me though I don't in the least believe in
them. Tied, hands and feet!"

"Inherited instinct." He shook his head sadly. "That's the skeleton
at life's banquet. It takes away my appetite."

She laughed without mirth, then sighed with some self-mockery. "It
frightens ME away from the table."

XV.

GRADUATED PEARLS.

But Scarborough declined her invitation. However, he did come to
dinner ten days later; and Gl