astering that he could hardly
restrain himself from whispering, "Evelyn, I love you." In a hundred
ways he was telling her so. And she must understand. She must know that
this was not an affair of the moment, but that there was condensed in it
all the constant devotion of months and months.

A woman, even any girl with the least social experience, would have
seen this. Was Evelyn's sympathetic attention, her evident enjoyment in
talking with him, any evidence of a personal interest, or only a young
girl's enjoyment of her new position in the world? That she liked him
he was sure. Did she, was she beginning in any degree to return
his passion? He could not tell, for guilelessness in a woman is as
impenetrable as coquetry.

Of what did they talk? A stenographer would have made a meagre report
of it, for the most significant part of this conversation of two fresh,
honest natures was not in words. One thing, however, Philip could bring
away with him that was not a mere haze of delicious impressions. She had
been longing, she said, to talk to him about his story. She told him how
eagerly she had read it, and in talking about its meaning she revealed
to him her inner thought more completely than she could have done in any
other way, her sympathy with his mind, her interest in his work.

"Have you begun another?" she asked, at last.

"No, not on paper."

"But you must. It must be such a world to you. I can't imagine anything
so fine as that. There is so much about life to be said. To make people
see it as it is; yes, and as it ought to be. Will you?"

"You forget that I am a lawyer."

"And you prefer to be that, a lawyer, rather than an author?"

"It is not exactly what I prefer, Miss Mavick."

"Why not? Does anybody do anything well if his heart is not in it?"

"But circumstances sometimes compel a man."

"I like better for men to compel circumstances," the girl exclaimed,
with that disposition to look at things in the abstract that Philip so
well remembered.

"Perhaps I do not make myself understood. One must have a career."

"A career?" And Evelyn looked puzzled for a moment. "You mean for
himself, for his own self?" There is a lawyer who comes to see papa.
I've been in the room sometimes, when they don't mind. Such talk about
schemes, and how to do this and that, and twisting about. And not a word
about anything any of the time. And one day when he was waiting for papa
I talked with him. You would have been