ng your
name, cutting your initials in tree trunks, doing all the fool things a
man does when he's in love, and I am the most miserable man in the
world--and the happiest!"

He finally succeeded in making Miss Kirkland so miserable also that she
decided to run away. Friends had planned to spend the early spring on
the Nile and were eager that she should accompany them. To her the
separation seemed to offer an excellent method of discovering whether or
not Ainsley was the man she could not "live without."

Ainsley saw in it only an act of torture, devised with devilish cruelty.

"What will happen to me," he announced firmly, "is that I will plain
_die_! As long as I can see you, as long as I have the chance to try and
make you understand that no one can possibly love you as I do, and as
long as I know I am worrying you to death, and no one else is, I still
hope. I've no right to hope, still I do. And that one little chance
keeps me alive. But Egypt! If you escape to Egypt, what hold will I have
on you? You might as well be in the moon. Can you imagine me writing
love-letters to a woman in the moon? Can I send American Beauty roses to
the ruins of Karnak? Here I can telephone you; not that I ever have
anything to say that you want to hear, but because I want to listen to
your voice, and to have you ask, 'Oh! is that _you_?' as though you were
glad it _was_ me. But Egypt! Can I call up Egypt on the long-distance?
If you leave me now, you'll leave me forever, for I'll drown myself in
Lone Lake."

The day she sailed away he went to the steamer, and, separating her
from her friends and family, drew her to the side of the ship farther
from the wharf, and which for the moment, was deserted. Directly below a
pile-driver, with rattling of chains and shrieks from her donkey-engine,
was smashing great logs; on the deck above, the ship's band was braying
forth fictitious gayety, and from every side they were assailed by the
raucous whistles of ferry-boats. The surroundings were not conducive to
sentiment, but for the first time Polly Kirkland seemed a little
uncertain, a little frightened; almost on the verge of tears, almost
persuaded to surrender. For the first time she laid her hand on
Ainsley's arm, and the shock sent the blood to his heart and held him
breathless. When the girl looked at him there was something in her eyes
that neither he nor any other man had ever seen there.

"The last thing I tell you," she said, "the t