he couldn't stop."

The Captain clapped his palm down upon the gate-post.

"Strike me straight! I never thought of that."

Chapter XIV

Blix and Condy went on; on along the narrow road upon the edge of the
salt marshes and tules that lay between the station and the Golden
Gate; on to the Golden Gate itself, and around the old grime-incrusted
fort to the ocean shore, with its reaches of hard, white sand, where
the bowlders lay tumbled and the surf grumbled incessantly.

The world seemed very far away from them here on the shores of the
Pacific, on that first afternoon of the New Year. They were supremely
happy, and they sufficed to themselves. Condy had forgotten all about
the next day, when he must say good-by to Blix.

It did not seem possible, it was not within the bounds of possibility,
that she was to go away--that they two were to be separated. And for
that matter, to-morrow was to-morrow. It was twenty-four hours away.
The present moment was sufficient.

The persistence with which they clung to the immediate moment, their
happiness in living only in the present, had brought about a rather
curious condition of things between them.

In their love for each other there was no thought of marriage; they
were too much occupied with the joy of being together at that
particular instant to think of the future. They loved each other, and
that was enough. They did not look ahead further than the following
day, and then but furtively, and only in order that their morrow's
parting might intensify their happiness of to-day. That New Year's Day
was to be the end of everything. Blix was going; she and Condy would
never see each other again. The thought of marriage--with its certain
responsibilities, its duties, its gravity, its vague, troublous
seriousness, its inevitable disappointments--was even a little
distasteful to them. Their romance had been hitherto without a flaw;
they had been genuinely happy in little things. It was as well that it
should end that day, in all its pristine sweetness, unsullied by a
single bitter moment, undimmed by the cloud of a single disillusion or
disappointment. Whatever chanced to them in later years, they could at
least cherish this one memory of a pure, unselfish affection, young and
unstained and almost without thought of sex, come and gone on the very
threshold of their lives. This was the end, they both understood.
They were glad that it was to be so. They did not