t it, Lily. I'm mad about you. I'm mad for
you."

There was a new air of maturity about Lily those days, and sometimes
a sort of aloofness that both maddened him and increased his desire to
possess her. She went into his arms, but when he held her closest she
sometimes seemed farthest away.

"I want you now."

"I want to be engaged a long time, Louis. We have so much to learn about
each other."

He thought that rather childish. But whatever had been his motive in the
beginning, he was desperately in love with her by that time, and because
of that he frightened her sometimes. He was less sure of himself, too,
even after she had accepted him, and to prove his continued dominance
over her he would bully her.

"Come here," he would say, from the hearth rug, or by the window.

"Certainly not."

"Come here."

Sometimes she went, to be smothered in his hot embrace; sometimes she
did not.

But her infatuation persisted, although there were times when his
inordinate vitality and his caresses gave her a sense of physical
weariness, times when sheer contact revolted her. He seemed always to
want to touch her. Fastidiously reared, taught a sort of aloofness from
childhood, Lily found herself wondering if all men in love were like
that, always having to be held off.

CHAPTER XX

Ellen was staying at the Boyd house. She went downstairs the morning
after her arrival, and found the bread--bakery bread--toasted and
growing cold on the table, while a slice of ham, ready to be cooked, was
not yet on the fire, and Mrs. Boyd had run out to buy some milk.

Dan had already gone, and his half-empty cup of black coffee was on the
kitchen table. Ellen sniffed it and raised her eyebrows.

She rolled up her sleeves, put the toast in the oven and the ham in the
frying pan, with much the same grimness with which she had sat the night
before listening to Mrs. Boyd's monologue. If this was the way they
looked after Willy Cameron, no wonder he was thin and pale. She threw
out the coffee, which she suspected had been made by the time-saving
method of pouring water on last night's grounds, and made a fresh pot of
it. After that she inspected the tea towels, and getting a tin dishpan,
set them to boil in it on the top of the range.

"Enough to give him typhoid," she reflected.

Ellen disapproved of her surroundings; she disapproved of any woman who
did not boil her tea towels. And when Edith came down carefully dressed
and unden