e of it, indeed?"

They had seated themselves on a commanding rock under the pines, but
Lansing could not see the view at their feet for the stir of the brown
lashes on her cheek.

"You mean: Nat and Grace may after all be having the best of it?"

"How can I say, when I've told you I see all the sides? Of course,"
Susy added hastily, "I couldn't live as they do for a week. But it's
wonderful how little it's dimmed them."

"Certainly Nat was never more coruscating. And she keeps it up even
better." He reflected. "We do them good, I daresay."

"Yes--or they us. I wonder which?"

After that, he seemed to remember that they sat a long time silent, and
that his next utterance was a boyish outburst against the tyranny of the
existing order of things, abruptly followed by the passionate query why,
since he and she couldn't alter it, and since they both had the habit of
looking at facts as they were, they wouldn't be utter fools not to take
their chance of being happy in the only way that was open to them, To
this challenge he did not recall Susy's making any definite answer; but
after another interval, in which all the world seemed framed in a
sudden kiss, he heard her murmur to herself in a brooding tone: "I don't
suppose it's ever been tried before; but we might--." And then and there
she had laid before him the very experiment they had since hazarded.

She would have none of surreptitious bliss, she began by declaring;
and she set forth her reasons with her usual lucid impartiality. In the
first place, she should have to marry some day, and when she made the
bargain she meant it to be an honest one; and secondly, in the matter
of love, she would never give herself to anyone she did not really care
for, and if such happiness ever came to her she did not want it shorn of
half its brightness by the need of fibbing and plotting and dodging.

"I've seen too much of that kind of thing. Half the women I know who've
had lovers have had them for the fun of sneaking and lying about it; but
the other half have been miserable. And I should be miserable."

It was at this point that she unfolded her plan. Why shouldn't they
marry; belong to each other openly and honourably, if for ever so short
a time, and with the definite understanding that whenever either of them
got the chance to do better he or she should be immediately released?
The law of their country facilitated such exchanges, and society was
beginning to view them as