t on the balcony outside Anita's sitting
room, the girl swathed in white furs and leaning back in her steamer
chair.

Below lay the terrace of the Kurhaus, edged with evergreen trees. Beyond
and far below that was the mountain village, a few scattered houses
along a frozen stream. The townspeople retired early; light after light
was extinguished, until only one in the priest's house remained. A train
crept out of one tunnel and into another, like a glowing worm crawling
from burrow to burrow.

The girl felt a change in Stewart. During the weeks he had known her
there had been a curious restraint in his manner to her. There were
times when an avowal seemed to tremble on his lips, when his eyes looked
into hers with the look no women ever mistakes; the next moment he would
glance away, his face would harden. They were miles apart. And perhaps
the situation had piqued the girl. Certainly it had lost nothing for her
by its unusualness.

To-night there was a difference in the man. His eyes met hers squarely,
without evasion, but with a new quality, a searching, perhaps, for
something in her to give him courage. The girl had character, more than
ordinary decision. It was what Stewart admired in her most, and the
thing, of course, that the little Marie had lacked. Moreover, Anita,
barely twenty, was a woman, not a young girl. Her knowledge of the
world, not so deep as Marie's, was more comprehensive. Where Marie would
have been merciful, Anita would be just, unless she cared for him. In
that case she might be less than just, or more.

Anita in daylight was a pretty young woman, rather incisive of speech,
very intelligent, having a wit without malice, charming to look at,
keenly alive. Anita in the dusk of the balcony, waiting to hear she knew
not what, was a judicial white goddess, formidably still, frightfully
potential. Stewart, who had embraced many women, did not dare a finger
on her arm.

He had decided on a way to tell the girl the story--a preamble about his
upbringing, which had been indifferent, his struggle to get to Vienna,
his loneliness there, all leading with inevitable steps to Marie. From
that, if she did not utterly shrink from him, to his love for her.

It was his big hour, that hour on the balcony. He was reaching, through
love, heights of honesty he had never scaled before. But as a matter of
fact he reversed utterly his order of procedure. The situation got him,
this first evening absolutely alone w