"I will not say a word against my father. I know you would not respect
me if I did. We are different, he and I, and find happiness in different
ways." Bob wondered if his father had ever found it. "If I had never
met you and loved you, I should have refused to lead the life my father
wishes me to lead. It is not in me to do the things he will ask. I shall
have to carve out my own life, and I feel that I am as well able to do
it as he was. Percy Broke, a classmate of mine and my best friend, has
a position for me in a locomotive works in which his father is largely
interested. We are going in together, the day after we graduate; it is
all arranged, and his father has agreed. I shall work very hard, and
in a few years, Cynthia, we shall be together, never to part again. Oh,
Cynthia," he cried, carried away by the ecstasy of this dream which he
had, summoned up, "why do you resist me? I love you as no man has ever
loved," he exclaimed, with scornful egotism and contempt of those who
had made the world echo with that cry through the centuries, "and you
love me! Ah, do you think I do not see it--cannot feel it? You love
me--tell me so."

He was coming toward her, and how was she to prevent his taking her by
storm? That was his way, and well she knew it. In her dreams she had
felt herself lifted and borne off, breathless in his arms, to Elysium.
Her breath was going now, her strength was going, and yet she made him
pause by the magic of a word. A concession was in that word, but one
could not struggle so piteously and concede nothing.

"Bob," she said, "do you love me?"

Love her! If there was a love that acknowledged no bounds, that was
confined by no superlatives, it was his. He began to speak, but she
interrupted him with a wild passion that was new to her. As he sat in
the train on his way back to Cambridge through the darkening afternoon,
the note of it rang in his ears and gave him hope--yes, and through many
months afterward.

"If you love me I beg, I implore, I beseech you in the name of that
love--for your sake and my sake, to leave me. Oh, can you not see why
you must go?"

He stopped, even as he had before in the parlor in Mount Vernon Street.
He could but stop in the face of such an appeal--and yet the blood beat
in his head with a mad joy.

"Tell me that you love me,--once," he cried,--"once, Cynthia."

"Do-do not ask me," she faltered. "Go."

Her words were a supplication, not a command. And in that the