ssess life only through
him? Doubtless the sublime effrontery of that interpretation reached
her. She commenced to laugh, her colour rising. She glanced away, and
her laughter died.

"You may as well understand," he said, "that I am never going to leave
you alone."

She started across the leaf-strewn grass. He kept pace with her.

"Are you going to force me to make a scene?" she asked.

"Except with your father," he said, "I don't think it would make much
difference."

He felt that if she had had anything in her hands then she would have
struck at him.

"It's not because I'm a beast," he said, quietly, "that I have no grief
for my father. He was through. Life had nothing to offer him. He had
nothing to offer life. Don't think I'm incapable of grief. I experienced
it the day I thought you might be dead. That was because you had so
much to offer life--rather more than life had to offer you."

He saw her shrink from him but she walked on, repressing her pain and
her anger.

"Since I've known intimately girls of your class," he said, "I've
realized that not all of them would have turned and tried to wound as
you did that day. Some would have laughed. Some would have been sorry
and sympathetic. I don't think many would have made such a scene."

He smiled down at her.

"I want you to realize it is your own fault. You started this. I'm not
scolding. I'm glad you were such a little fury. Otherwise, I might have
gone on working for your father or for somebody else's father. But
you're to blame for my persistence, so learn to put up with it. As long
as I keep the riding crop with which you tried to cut my face I'll
remember what I said I'd do, and I'll do it."

She didn't answer, but if she tried to give him the impression she
wasn't listening she failed utterly.

Around a curve in the path came a bent, white old man, bundled in a
heavy muffler and coat. In one hand he carried a thick cane. The other
rested on the arm of a young fellow of the private secretary stamp.
There, George acknowledged, advanced the single person with whom a scene
might make a serious difference, yet a more compelling thought crept in
and overcame his sense of danger. That was the type of man who made
wars. That man, indeed, was helping to finance this war. George was
obsessed by the dun day: by the leaves, fallen and rotten; by the memory
of the oblong box. Everything reminded him that not far away Death
marched with a bland, black triump