ut they were weeks of increasing
uneasiness and pain for Norma, and she knew that Chris found them even
less endurable than she. The happy hours of confidence and happiness
grew fewer and fewer, and as their passion strengthened, and the
insuperable obstacles to its natural development impressed them more and
more forcibly, miserable and anxious times took their place. Their love
was no sooner acknowledged than both came to realize how mad and
hopeless it was, and that no reiteration of its intensity and no
argument could ever give them a gleam of hope.

If Norma had drifted cheerfully and recklessly into this situation, she
paid for it now, when petty restrictions and conventions stung her like
so many bees, and when she could turn nowhere for relief from constant
heartache and the sickening monotony of her thoughts. She could not have
Chris; she could not give him up. Hours with him were only a degree more
bearable than hours without him.

When he spoke hopefully of a possible change, of "something" making
their happiness possible, she would turn on him like a little virago.
Yet if he despaired, tears would come to Norma's eyes, and she would beg
him almost angrily to change his tone, or she would disgrace them both
by beginning to cry.

Norma grew thin and fidgety, able to concentrate her mind on
nothing, and openly indifferent to the society she had courted so
enthusiastically a year ago. It was a part of her suffering that she
grew actually to dislike Alice, always so suave and cheerful, always so
serenely sure of Chris's devotion. What right had this woman, who had
been rich and spoiled and guarded all her life, to hold him away from
the woman he loved? Chris had been chained to this couch for years,
reading, playing his piano, infinitely solicitous and sympathetic. But
was he to spend all his life thus? Was there to be no glorious
companionship, no adventure, no deep and satisfying love for Chris, ever
in this world? Norma wished no ill to Alice, but she hated a world that
could hold Alice's claim legitimate.

"Why should it be so?" she said to Chris one day, bitterly. "Why, when
all my life was going so happily, did I have to fall in love with you, I
wonder? It could so easily have been somebody else!"

"I don't know!" Chris answered, soberly, flinging away his half-finished
cigarette, and folding his arms over his chest, as he stared through a
screen of bare trees at the river. It was a March day of warm a