nquer
men of will and then make them irresistible instruments. "What is your
dream?--happiness? . . . love?"

She gazed past him with swimming eyes, with a glance that seemed like a
brave bright bird exploring infinity. "Yes," she said under her breath.
"But it could never--never come true. It's too perfect."

"Don't doubt," he said, in a tone that fitted her mood as the rhythm of
the cradle fits the gentle breathing of the sleeping child. "Don't ever
doubt. And the dream will come true."

"You have been in love?" she said, under the spell of his look and tone.

He nodded slowly. "I am," he replied, and he was under the spell of her
beauty.

"Is it--wonderful?"

"Like nothing else on earth. Everything else seems--poor and
cheap--beside it."

He drew a step nearer. "But you couldn't love--not yet," he said. "You
haven't had the experience. You will have to learn."

"You don't know me," she cried. "I have been teaching myself ever since
I was a little girl. I've thought of nothing else most of the time.
Oh--" she clasped her white hands against her small bosom--"if I ever
have the chance, how much I shall give!"

"I know it! I know it!" he replied. "You will make some man happier than
ever man was before." His infatuation did not blind him to the fact that
she cared nothing about him, looked on him in the most unpersonal way.
But that knowledge seemed only to inflame him the more, to lash him on
to the folly of an ill-timed declaration. "I have felt how much you will
give--how much you will love--I've felt it from the second time I saw
you--perhaps from the first. I've never seen any woman who interested me
as you do--who drew me as you do--against my ambition--against my will.
I--I----"

He had been fighting against the words that would come in spite of him.
He halted now because the food of emotion suffocated speech. He stood
before her, ghastly pale and trembling. She did not draw back. She
seemed compelled by his will, by the force of his passion, to stay where
she was. But in her eyes was a fascinated terror--a fear of him--of the
passion that dominated him, a passion like the devils that made men gash
themselves and leap from precipices into the sea. To unaccustomed eyes
the first sight of passion is always terrifying and is usually
repellent. One must learn to adventure the big wave, the great hissing,
towering billow that conceals behind its menace the wild rapture of
infinite longing realized.

"I