on her refusal seemed a natural
thing to him. He slipped through all the grades of despondency until he
reached a bottom of absolute gloom. Failure seemed to mark the whole of
his life; he had failed with Katharine, and now he had failed with
Mary. Up at once sprang the thought of Katharine, and with it a sense of
exulting freedom, but this he checked instantly. No good had ever come
to him from Katharine; his whole relationship with her had been made up
of dreams; and as he thought of the little substance there had been in
his dreams he began to lay the blame of the present catastrophe upon his
dreams.

"Haven't I always been thinking of Katharine while I was with Mary? I
might have loved Mary if it hadn't been for that idiocy of mine. She
cared for me once, I'm certain of that, but I tormented her so with my
humors that I let my chances slip, and now she won't risk marrying me.
And this is what I've made of my life--nothing, nothing, nothing."

The tramp of their boots upon the dry road seemed to asseverate nothing,
nothing, nothing. Mary thought that this silence was the silence
of relief; his depression she ascribed to the fact that he had seen
Katharine and parted from her, leaving her in the company of William
Rodney. She could not blame him for loving Katharine, but that, when he
loved another, he should ask her to marry him--that seemed to her
the cruellest treachery. Their old friendship and its firm base upon
indestructible qualities of character crumbled, and her whole past
seemed foolish, herself weak and credulous, and Ralph merely the shell
of an honest man. Oh, the past--so much made up of Ralph; and now, as
she saw, made up of something strange and false and other than she had
thought it. She tried to recapture a saying she had made to help herself
that morning, as Ralph paid the bill for luncheon; but she could see
him paying the bill more vividly than she could remember the phrase.
Something about truth was in it; how to see the truth is our great
chance in this world.

"If you don't want to marry me," Ralph now began again, without
abruptness, with diffidence rather, "there is no need why we should
cease to see each other, is there? Or would you rather that we should
keep apart for the present?"

"Keep apart? I don't know--I must think about it."

"Tell me one thing, Mary," he resumed; "have I done anything to make you
change your mind about me?"

She was immensely tempted to give way to her na