to do right, don't you?"

"Yes, above all other cases," said Elmore, with a laugh.

She flushed in recognition of her absurdity. "I mean that we oughtn't to
let our feelings carry us away. I saw so many girls carried away by
their feelings, when the first regiments went off, that I got a horror
of it. I think it's wicked: it deceives both; and then you don't know
how to break the engagement afterward."

"You're quite right, Lily," said Elmore, with a rising respect for the
girl.

"Professor Elmore, can you believe that, with all the attentions I've
had, I've never seriously thought of getting married as the end of it
all?" she asked, looking him freely in the eyes.

"I can't understand it,--no man could, I suppose,--but I do believe it.
Mrs. Elmore has often told me the same thing."

"And this--letter--it--means marriage."

"That and nothing else. The man who wrote it would consider himself
cruelly wronged if you accepted his attentions without the distinct
purpose of marrying him."

She drew a deep breath. "I shall have to ask you to write a refusal for
me." But still she did not give him the letter.

"Have you made up your mind to that?"

"I can't make up my mind to anything else."

Elmore walked unhappily back and forth across the room. "I have seen
something of international marriages since I've been in Europe," he
said. "Sometimes they succeed; but generally they're wretched failures.
The barriers of different race, language, education, religion,--they're
terrible barriers. It's very hard for a man and woman to understand
each other at the best; with these differences added, it's almost a
hopeless case."

"Yes; that's what Mrs. Elmore said."

"And suppose you were married to an Austrian officer stationed in Italy.
You would have _no_ society outside of the garrison. Every other human
creature that looked at you would hate you. And if you were ordered to
some of those half barbaric principalities,--Moldavia or Wallachia, or
into Hungary or Bohemia,--everywhere your husband would be an instrument
for the suppression of an alien or disaffected population. What a fate
for an American girl!"

"If he were good," said the girl, replying in the abstract, "she needn't
care."

"If he were good, you needn't care. No. And he might leave the Austrian
service, and go with you to America, as he hints. What could he do
there? He might get an appointment in our army, though that's not so
easy now; or he might go