rded the ground before him--thoughtfully.

"Life," said Cecily, "has either got to be religious or else it goes to
pieces.... Perhaps anyhow it goes to pieces...."

Mr. Direck endorsed these observations by a slow nodding of the head.

He allowed a certain interval to elapse. Then a vaguely apprehended
purpose that had been for a time forgotten in these higher interests
came back to him. He took it up with a breathless sense of temerity.

"Well," he said, "then you don't hate me?"

She smiled.

"You don't dislike me or despise me?"

She was still reassuring.

"You don't think I'm just a slow American sort of portent?"

"No."

"You think, on the whole, I might even--someday--?"

She tried to meet his eyes with a pleasant frankness, and perhaps she
was franker than she meant to be.

"Look here," said Mr. Direck, with a little quiver of emotion softening
his mouth. "I'll ask you something. We've got to wait. Until you feel
clearer. Still.... Could you bring yourself--? If just once--I could
kiss you....

"I'm going away to Germany," he went on to her silence. "But I shan't be
giving so much attention to Germany as I supposed I should when I
planned it out. But somehow--if I felt--that I'd kissed you...."

With a delusive effect of calmness the young lady looked first over her
left shoulder and then over her right and surveyed the park about them.
Then she stood up. "We can go that way home," she said with a movement
of her head, "through the little covert."

Mr. Direck stood up too.

"If I was a poet or a bird," said Mr. Direck, "I should sing. But being
just a plain American citizen all I can do is just to talk about all I'd
do if I wasn't...."

And when they had reached the little covert, with its pathway of soft
moss and its sheltering screen of interlacing branches, he broke the
silence by saying, "Well, what's wrong with right here and now?" and
Cecily stood up to him as straight as a spear, with gifts in her clear
eyes. He took her soft cool face between his trembling hands, and kissed
her sweet half-parted lips. When he kissed her she shivered, and he held
her tighter and would have kissed her again. But she broke away from
him, and he did not press her. And muter than ever, pondering deeply,
and secretly trembling in the queerest way, these two outwardly sedate
young people returned to the Dower House....

And after tea the taxicab from the junction came for him and he
vanished, and was last