stay with you. You see, I ought to have gone away long ago."

Believing, as he did, that marriage was the goal of all women, even of
the best, the immediate capitulation he had expected would have made
matters far less difficult. But these scruples of hers, so startlingly
his own, her disquieting insight into his entire mental process had a
momentary checking effect, summoned up the vague presage of a future that
might become extremely troublesome and complicated. His very reluctance
to discuss with her the problem she had raised warned him that he had
been swept into deep waters. On the other hand, her splendid resistance
appealed to him, enhanced her value. And accustomed as he had been to a
lifelong self-gratification, the thought of being balked in this supreme
desire was not to be borne. Such were the shades of his feeling as he
listened to her.

"That's nonsense!" he exclaimed, when she had finished. "You're a lady
--I know all about your family, I remember hearing about it when your
father came here--it's as good as any in New England. What do you suppose
I care, Janet? We love each other--I've got to have you. We'll be married
in the spring, when the rush is over."

He drew her to him once more, and suddenly, in the ardour of that
embrace, he felt her tenseness suddenly relax--as though, against her
will--and her passion, as she gave her lips, vied with his own. Her lithe
body trembled convulsively, her cheeks were wet as she clung to him and
hid her face in his shoulder. His sensations in the presence of this
thing he had summoned up in her were incomprehensible, surpassing any he
had ever known. It was no longer a woman he held in his arms, the woman
he craved, but something greater, more fearful, the mystery of sorrow and
suffering, of creation and life--of the universe itself.

"Janet--aren't you happy?" he said again.

She released herself and smiled at him wistfully through her tears.

"I don't know. What I feel doesn't seem like happiness. I can't believe
in it, somehow."

"You must believe in it," he said.

"I can't,--perhaps I may, later. You'd better go now," she begged.
"You'll miss your train."

He glanced at the office clock. "Confound it, I have to. Listen! I'll be
back this evening, and I'll get that little car of mine--"

"No, not to-night--I don't want to go--to-night."

"Why not?"

"Not to-night," she repeated.

"Well then, to-morrow. To-morrow's Sunday. Do you know where the Boa