ne, "I won't do it. I'm going back to New
York, that's all there is about it!" Mrs. Dale finally yielded that
much. She had to.

There was a letter from Suzanne after three days, saying that she
couldn't answer his letter in full, but that she was coming back to New
York and would see him, and subsequently a meeting between Suzanne and
Eugene at Daleview in her mother's presence--Dr. Woolley and
Mr. Pitcairn were in another part of the house at the time--in which the
proposals were gone over anew.

Eugene had motored down after Mrs. Dale's demands had been put before
him in the gloomiest and yet more feverish frame of mind in which he had
ever been,--gloomy because of heavy forebodings of evil and his own dark
financial condition--while inspirited at other moments by thoughts of
some splendid, eager revolt on the part of Suzanne, of her rushing to
him, defying all, declaring herself violently and convincingly, and so
coming off a victor with him. His faith in her love was still so great.

The night was one of those cold October ones with a steely sky and a
sickle moon, harbinger of frost, newly seen in the west, and pointed
stars thickening overhead. As he sat in his car on the Staten Island
ferry boat, he could see a long line of southward bound ducks, homing to
those reedy marshes which Bryant had in mind when he wrote "To a
Waterfowl." They were honking as they went, their faint "quacks" coming
back on the thin air and making him feel desperately lonely and bereft.
When he reached Daleview, speeding past October trees, and entered the
great drawing-room where a fire was blazing and where once in spring he
had danced with Suzanne, his heart leaped up, for he was to see her, and
the mere sight of her was as a tonic to his fevered body--a cool drink
to a thirsting man.

Mrs. Dale stared at Eugene defiantly when he came, but Suzanne welcomed
him to her embrace. "Oh!" she exclaimed, holding him close for a few
moments and breathing feverishly. There was complete silence for a time.

"Mama insists, Eugene," she said after a time, "that we ought to wait a
year, and I think since there is such a fuss about it, that perhaps it
might be just as well. We may have been just a little hasty, don't you
think? I have told mama what I think about her action in going to
Mr. Colfax, but she doesn't seem to care. She is threatening now to have
me adjudged insane. A year won't make any real difference since I am
coming to you, anyho