before. We are
going to have tea together again.'

His utterances were forced, and the laugh that came between them
betrayed the quivering of his nerves.

'Tell me what you have been doing. I have thought of you day and night.'

He brought a chair close to her, and when he had seated himself he took
one of her hands. Monica, scarcely repressing a sob, the result of
reaction from her fears and miseries, drew the hand away. But again he
took it.

'There's the glove on it,' he said in a shaking voice. 'What harm in my
holding your glove? Don't think of it, and talk to me. I love music,
but no music is like your voice.'

'You go on Monday?'

It was her lips spoke the sentence, not she.

'No, on Tuesday--I think.'

'My--Mr. Widdowson is going to take me away from London.'

'Away?'

She told him the circumstances. Bevis kept his eyes upon her face, with
a look of rapt adoration which turned at length to pain and woeful
perplexity.

'You have been married a year,' he murmured. 'Oh, if I had met you
before that! What a cruel fate that we should know each other only when
there was no hope!'

The man revealed himself in this dolorous sentimentality. His wonted
blitheness and facetiousness, his healthy features, his supple,
well-built frame, suggested that when love awoke within him he would
express it with virile force. But he trembled and blushed like a young
girl, and his accents fell at last into a melodious whining.

He raised the gloved fingers to his lips. Monica bent her face away,
deadly pale, with closed eyes.

'Are we to part to-day, and never again see each other?' he went on.
'Say that you love me! Only say that you love me!'

'You despise me for coming to you like this.'

'Despise you?'

In a sudden rapture he folded his arms about her.

'Say that you love me!'

He kissed away the last syllable of her whispered reply.

'Monica!--what is there before us? How can I leave you?'

Yielding herself for the moment in a faintness that threatened to
subdue her, she was yet able, when his caresses grew wild with passion,
to put back his arms and move suddenly away. He sprang up, and they
stood speechless. Again he drew near.

'Take me away with you!' Monica then cried, clasping her hands
together. 'I can't live with _him_. Let me go with you to France.'

Bevis's blue eyes widened with consternation.

'Dare you--dare you do that?' he stammered.

'Dare I? What courage is needed? How _dare_ I rem