she was
trying very hard to make him even less than that--only the gnawing ache
in her heart wouldn't let her.

Yet when Tollman shifted her abstract acceptance of what he meant to her
to a question of a concrete application, she felt the sudden sinking of
despair.

All afternoon her father had been petulant and reminiscent. He had
seemed perversely bent on committing a righteous suicide by forcing her
to make him angry. He had cast into damnation all the "fads" and "isms"
of an ungodly present and, since he judged the time had come to point a
moral, he had buried Stuart Farquaharson at the bottom of the heap.

Even now Conscience winced under these tirades. The truth was that she
was heart-broken; that the image of Stuart, despite his feet of clay,
was still shrined in her life. But she was fighting that and she did not
know that the fight was hopeless.

So to-night, as she sat with a sewing basket in her lap and Tollman sat
across from her in the chair he had so often occupied of late, the
surprise came.

"Conscience," he said, and something in the tone of his voice caused her
to look suddenly up, "I've tried to be your friend because I've known
that it was only that way I could be anything."

Suddenly his voice leaped with a fierceness of which she had never
thought it capable. To her he had always been sort of extinct volcano,
and now he broke into eruption. "Must it always be only that? Is there
no hope for me?"

The piece of sewing in her hand dropped suddenly to her lap with the
needle thrust half through. She sat as if in tableau--a picture of
arrested motion.

She should have foreseen that the comfortable and platonic relation
could not last--but she had not foreseen it. It came with a shock and in
the wake of the shock came crowding pictures of all the rest of life,
painted in these dun tints of New England lethargy from which she had
prayed to be delivered. Then slowly and welling with disquiet, her eyes
rose to his and she found them full of suspense.

"I suppose," she answered in a bewildered tone, "I ought to have known.
But it's been so satisfying just as it was--that I didn't pause--to
analyze."

"Couldn't it still be satisfying, dear?" He took an eager step forward.
"Am I too much of a fossil?" He paused and then added with a note of
hurt. "I have felt young, since I've been in love with you."

The middle-aged lover stood bending forward, his face impatiently eager
and his attitude as st