ion. If it's an impossible contingency, it costs you the less
to promise."

He kept her hand in his as he said it, though she fidgeted to be free.
"Please, Nick," she said earnestly, "I would so much rather not."

"You prefer to marry me at once?" he asked, and suddenly it seemed to
her that this was the alternative to which he meant to drive her.

She rose in a panic, and he rose also, still keeping her hand. His
face looked like a block of yellow granite.

"Must it--must it--be one or the other?" she panted.

He looked at her under flickering eyelids. "I have said it," he
remarked.

Her resistance flagged, sank, rose again, and finally died away. After
all, why should she hesitate? What was there in such an undertaking as
this to send the blood so wildly to her heart?

"Very well," she said faintly at last. "I promise. But--but--I never
shall change my mind, Nick--never--never."

He was still looking at her with veiled, impenetrable eyes. He paid no
attention to her protest. It was as if he had not so much as heard it.

"You've done your part," he said. "Now hear me do mine. I swear to
you--before God--that I will never marry you unless you ask me to."

He bent with the words, and solemnly, reverently, he pressed his lips
upon the hand he held.

Muriel waited, half-frightened still, and wholly awestruck. She did
not know Nick in this mood.

But when he straightened himself again, the old whimsical smile was on
his face, and she breathed a sigh of relief. With a quick, caressing
movement he took her by the shoulders.

"That's over then," he said lightly. "Turn over and start another
page. Go back to England, go back to school; and let them teach you to
be young again."

They were his last words to her. Yet an instant longer he waited, and
very deep down in her heart something that was hidden there stirred
and quivered as a blind creature moves at the touch of the sun. It
awoke a vague pain within her, that was all.

The next moment Nick had turned upon his heel and was departing.

She heard him humming a waltz tune under his breath as he went away
with his free British swagger. And she knew with no sense of elation
that she had gained her point.

For good or ill he had left her, and he would not return.

PART III

CHAPTER XVII

AN OLD FRIEND

"There!" said Daisy, standing back from the table to review her
handiwork with her head on one side. "I may be outrageously childish,
but