mock hung, inviting ease,
but neither of them took it. She sat primly on the straight-backed,
green settee, and he sat on the step at her feet with his hat pulled
over his eyes.

"What an infernal nuisance I have been to you!" he said ruefully; "but
no more than I have been to myself. The only difference was that I had
to stand it, and you stood it out of the goodness of that kind little
heart of yours. Well, it's nearly over now; I'm expecting to go to the
city any day. I guess you'll not be sorry to get rid of me, will you,
Miss Guinevere?"

Instead of answering, she drew a quick breath and turned her head away.
When she did speak, it was after a long pause.

"I like the way you say my name. Nobody says it like that down here."

"Guinevere?" he repeated.

She nodded. "When you say it like that, I feel like I was another
person. It makes me think of flowers, and poetry, and the wind in the
trees, and all those things I've been reading you out of your books.
Guin-never and Guinevere _don't_ seem the same at all, do they?"

"They aren't the same," he said, "and you aren't the same girl I met on
the boat last March. I guess we've both grown a bit since then. You know
I was rather keen on dying about that time,--'in love with easeful
death,'--well, now I am not keen about anything, but I am willing to
play the game out."

They sat in silence for a while, then he said slowly, without raising
his eyes: "I am not much good at telling what I feel, but before I go
away I want you to know how much you've helped me. You have been the one
light that was left to show me the way down into the darkness."

A soft touch on his shoulder made him lift his head. Guinevere was
bending toward him, all restraint banished from her face by the
compassion and love that suffused it.

[Illustration: "'Oh, my God, it has come'"]

Instinctively he swayed toward her, all the need of her crying out
suddenly within him, then he pulled himself sharply together, and,
resolutely thrusting his hands in his pockets, rose and took a turn up
and down the porch.

"Do you mind reading to me a little?" he asked at length. "There are
forty devils in my head to-day, all hammering on the back of my
eyeballs. I'll get my Tennyson; you like him better than you do the
others. Wait; I'm going."

But she was up the steps before him, eager to serve, and determined to
spare him every effort.

Through the long afternoon Guinevere read, stumbling over the