place quite well. A lovely, green, quiet spot! With your
poetical ideas, Julie, you would delight in it. Two days--wandering in
the woods--together! Then I put you into the train for Brussels, and I
go my way. But to all eternity, Julie, those days will have been ours!"

At the first words, almost, Julie had disengaged herself. Pushing him
from her with both hands, she listened to him in a dumb amazement. The
color first deserted her face, then returned in a flood.

"So you despise me?" she said, catching her breath.

"No. I adore you."

She fell upon a chair and hid her eyes. He first knelt beside her,
arguing and soothing; then he paced up and down before her, talking very
fast and low, defending and developing the scheme, till it stood before
them complete and tempting in all its details.

Julie did not look up, nor did she speak. At last, Warkworth, full of
tears, and stifled with his own emotions, threw open the window again in
a craving for air and coolness. A scent of fresh leaves and moistened
earth floated up from the shrubbery beneath the window. The scent, the
branching trees, the wide, mild spaces of air brought relief. He leaned
out, bathing his brow in the night. A tumult of voices seemed to be
echoing through his mind, dominated by one which held the rest
defiantly in check.

"Is she a mere girl, to be 'led astray'? A moment of happiness--what
harm?--for either of us?"

Then he returned to Julie.

"Julie!" He touched her shoulder, trembling. Had she banished him
forever? It seemed to him that in these minutes he had passed through an
infinity of experience. Was he not the nobler, the more truly man? Let
the moralists talk.

"Julie!" he repeated, in an anguish.

She raised her head, and he saw that she had been crying. But there was
in her face a light, a wildness, a yearning that reassured him. She put
her arm round him and pressed her cheek to his. He divined that she,
too, had lived and felt a thousand hours in one. With a glow of ecstatic
joy he began to talk to her again, her head resting on his shoulder, her
slender hands crushed in his.

And Julie, meanwhile, was saying to herself, "Either I go to him, as he
asks, or in a few minutes I must send him away--forever."

And then as she clung to him, so warm and near, her strength failed her.
Nothing in the world mattered to her at that moment but this handsome,
curly head bowed upon her own, this voice that called her all the names
of lo