ow. I might have been and may be foolish; but I am no
trifler. I naturally cannot forget that little space in which I
flitted across the field of your vision in those days of the past, and
the recollection opens up all sorts of imaginings."

"Suppose my mother had not taken me away?" she murmured, her dreamy
eyes resting on the swaying tip of a distant tree.

"I should have seen you again."

"And then?"

"Then the fire would have burned higher and higher. What would have
immediately followed I know not; but sorrow and sickness of heart at
last."

"Why?"

"Well--that's the end of all love, according to Nature's law. I can
give no other reason."

"Oh, don't speak like that," she exclaimed. "Since we are only
picturing the possibilities of that time, don't, for pity's sake, spoil
the picture." Her voice sank almost to a whisper as she added, with an
incipient pout upon her full lips, "Let me think at least that if you
had really loved me at all seriously, you would have loved me for ever
and ever!"

"You are right--think it with all your heart," said he. "It is a
pleasant thought, and costs nothing."

She weighed that remark in silence a while. "Did you ever hear
anything of me from then till now?" she inquired.

"Not a word."

"So much the better. I had to fight the battle of life as well as you.
I may tell you about it some day. But don't ever ask me to do it, and
particularly do not press me to tell you now."

Thus the two or three days that they had spent in tender acquaintance
on the romantic slopes above the Neckar were stretched out in
retrospect to the length and importance of years; made to form a canvas
for infinite fancies, idle dreams, luxurious melancholies, and sweet,
alluring assertions which could neither be proved nor disproved. Grace
was never mentioned between them, but a rumor of his proposed domestic
changes somehow reached her ears.

"Doctor, you are going away," she exclaimed, confronting him with
accusatory reproach in her large dark eyes no less than in her rich
cooing voice. "Oh yes, you are," she went on, springing to her feet
with an air which might almost have been called passionate. "It is no
use denying it. You have bought a practice at Budmouth. I don't blame
you. Nobody can live at Hintock--least of all a professional man who
wants to keep abreast of recent discovery. And there is nobody here to
induce such a one to stay for other reasons. That's right, th