ave a little nod of scant civility, suggestive of
disapproval, and instead of turning in at the parlor door, made her
way directly to her room.

As the hall door closed after Flint, Winifred Anstice felt as if some
door had closed also in her life. She sat for some time in her low
chair, leaning forward, with her hands clasped about her knees, and
her pretty brows knit, gazing into the embers. At length, with a
little vexed shake of the head, she rose, and paced the long room; but
the whirl and rush of thought were too importunate for her present
mood, and she paused in her walk at last, and betook herself to the
table, with its litter of new books and magazines. She picked up the
"Fortnightly Review," and opened mechanically where a silver book-mark
pointed to an article on "Balzac and his Followers" marked with
emphatic notes of assent or protest. It was another reminder. She
impatiently shut the covers sharply together and returned to her
vigils before the fire.

There is no woman living who is not somewhat shaken by a proposal of
marriage. It is a peremptory challenge, which forces her, for the
moment at least, to consider a certain man not as one of a class,--as
a member of the conventional, calling, smiling, chaffing circle,--but
as an individual, passing suddenly from all this surface trifling to a
life and death reality--saying as Jonathan Flint had said this night:
"Give me all or nothing. I will have no half loaves. Let us have an
end of pretences and evasions. For once at least you shall listen, and
be told the truth flowing at lava heat out of a man's heart." It was
by no means a new experience to Winifred Anstice. As a younger girl,
although no coquette, she had found a certain charm of romance in
finding herself the heroine of a love-affair in real life; but as she
grew older she felt more and more shrinking from such sentimental
crises, and a more and more genuine regret as she saw the candid
comradeship of one friendship after another sacrificed to the
absorbing egotism of passion.

One by one she had let these lovers slip out of her life, and
acknowledged to herself that it was better so; but when it came to
Jonathan Flint, she had found herself impelled to the impetuous
protest for which she already half blamed herself in her heart. But in
self-exculpation she argued with the embers, which seemed to wink at
her from the hearth, that there were more considerations than one in
the matter; that as she