even the present?" said he with a smile.

"Not even the present," she answered with grave candor. "Nothing
seems to touch me--the real me. It's like--like looking out of
the window of the train at the landscape running by. I'm a
traveler passing through. I wonder if it'll always be that way.
I wonder if I'll ever arrive where I'll feel that I belong."

"I think so--and soon."

But she did not respond to his confident smile. "I--I hope so,"
she said with sad, wistful sweetness. "Then again--aren't there
some people who don't belong anywhere--aren't allowed to settle
down and be happy, but have to keep going--on and on--until----"

"Until they pass out into the dark," he finished for her. "Yes."
He looked at her in a wondering uneasy way. "You do suggest that
kind," said he. "But," smilingly, to hide his earnestness, "I'll
try to detain you."

"Please do," she said. "I don't want to go on--alone."

He dropped into silence, puzzled and in a way awed by the
mystery enveloping her--a mystery of aloofness and stoniness, of
complete separation from the contact of the world--the mystery
that incloses all whose real life is lived deep within themselves.

CHAPTER XXIV

LIKE days later, on the Eastern Express, they were not so
confident as they had been over the St. Nicholas champagne. As
confident about the remoter future, it was that annoying little
stretch near at hand which gave them secret uneasiness. There
had been nothing but dreaming and sentimentalizing in those four
days--and that disquietingly suggested the soldier who with an
impressive flourish highly resolves to give battle, then
sheathes his sword and goes away to a revel. Also, like all
idlers, they had spent money--far more money than total net cash
resources of less than five hundred dollars warranted.

"We've spent an awful lot of money," said Susan.

She was quick to see the faint frown, the warning that she was
on dangerous ground. Said he:

"Do you regret?"

"No, indeed--no!" cried she, eager to have that cloud vanish,
but honest too.

She no more than he regretted a single moment of the dreaming
and love-making, a single penny of the eighty and odd dollars
that had enabled them fittingly to embower their romance, to
twine myrtle in their hair and to provide Cupid's torch-bowls
with fragrant incense. Still--with the battle not begun, there
gaped that deep, wide hollow in the war chest.

Spenser's newspaper connectio