in his eyes. Their undoing had already
begun. Yet neither of them was to blame. From the first they had not
sought each other. Chance had brought them face to face, and mysterious
instincts as ungovernable as the winds of heaven were at work knitting
their lives together. Neither of them had asked that this thing should
be--that their destinies, their very souls, should be the sport of
chance. If they could have known, they would have shunned the fearful
risk. But they were allowed no voice in the matter. Why should it all
be?

It had been on a Wednesday that the scene in the B Street station had
taken place. Throughout the rest of the week, at every hour of the day,
Trina asked herself the same question: "Do I love him? Do I really love
him? Is this what love is like?" As she recalled McTeague--recalled his
huge, square-cut head, his salient jaw, his shock of yellow hair, his
heavy, lumbering body, his slow wits--she found little to admire in him
beyond his physical strength, and at such moments she shook her head
decisively. "No, surely she did not love him." Sunday afternoon,
however, McTeague called. Trina had prepared a little speech for him.
She was to tell him that she did not know what had been the matter with
her that Wednesday afternoon; that she had acted like a bad girl; that
she did not love him well enough to marry him; that she had told him as
much once before.

McTeague saw her alone in the little front parlor. The instant she
appeared he came straight towards her. She saw what he was bent upon
doing. "Wait a minute," she cried, putting out her hands. "Wait. You
don't understand. I have got something to say to you." She might as
well have talked to the wind. McTeague put aside her hands with a single
gesture, and gripped her to him in a bearlike embrace that all but
smothered her. Trina was but a reed before that giant strength. McTeague
turned her face to his and kissed her again upon the mouth. Where
was all Trina's resolve then? Where was her carefully prepared little
speech? Where was all her hesitation and torturing doubts of the last
few days? She clasped McTeague's huge red neck with both her slender
arms; she raised her adorable little chin and kissed him in return,
exclaiming: "Oh, I do love you! I do love you!" Never afterward were the
two so happy as at that moment.

A little later in that same week, when Marcus and McTeague were
taking lunch at the car conductors' coffee-joint, the former