ly held out a delightfully cool,
smooth hand. "At first," she said directly, "I thought it would be
better not to see you at all. Yet that wasn't genteel; and I felt, too,
that I must speak to you. Even at the danger, perhaps, of trespassing
into your privacy."

"I have given you the absolute right to do that," he told her. "It will
only bring me pleasure, to--to suppose I interest you enough--"

"Ah, but you do," she cried with clasping fingers. "It has made my work
here very difficult; the quiet has gone before echoes that I think every
child must hear, echoes from spaces and things that appall me. Here, you
see, I have lived so apart from others, perhaps selfishly, that I had
grown accustomed to a false sense of peace. Only lessons and little
questions, little hands. It seems now that I have been outside of life
itself, in a cowardly seclusion. Yet it had always been that way; I
didn't know." Her face was deeply troubled, the clear depths of her eyes
held a new questioning doubt.

"It's because of that, mainly, I ask you to marry me," he replied,
standing before the table at which, unconsciously, she had taken her
place; "it is because of your astonishing purity. You are so beautiful;
and this quiet, peace--you must have it all your life; it is the air,
the garden air, for you to flower in. I can give it to you, miles of it,
farther than you can see. All that you care for heaped about you. But
not that only," he insisted, "for I realized that no one lives to whom
such things are less; I can give you something more, not to be talked
about; whatever my life has been it has at least brought me to your
feet. I have learned, for you, that there is a thing men must have, God
knows exactly what--a craving to be satisfied, a--a reaching. And that
itself, the knowledge of such need, is not without value. Because of it
I again, and shall again, if necessary, ask you to marry me."

She replied in a low voice. "You must marry the child's mother." For the
first time she avoided him; bright blood burned in her cheeks; a hand on
the edge of the table was straining, white. A sudden feeling of
helplessness came over him, with, behind it, the ever-present edge of
anger, of impatience. He took a step forward, as if to crush, by sheer
insistence, her opposition; but he stopped. He lost entirely the sense
of her fragile physical being; she seemed only a spirit, shining and
high, and insuperably lovely. Then all feeling was lost but th