d, and for an instant, though the light in the room had failed
a little more and would soon be mainly that of the flaring lamps on the
windy Parade, he caught from her dark eye a silver gleam of impatience.
"You've suffered and you've worked--which, God knows, is what I've done!
_Of course_ you've suffered," she said--"you inevitably had to! We have
to," she went on, "to do or to be or to get anything."

"And pray what have I done or been or got?" Herbert Dodd found it almost
desolately natural to demand.

It made her cover him again as with all she was thinking of. "Can you
imagine nothing, or can't you conceive--?" And then as her challenge
struck deeper in, deeper down than it had yet reached, and with the
effect of a rush of the blood to his face, "It was _for_ you, it was
_for_ you!" she again broke out--"and for what or whom else could it
have been?"

He saw things to a tune now that made him answer straight: "I thought at
one time it might be for Bill Frankle."

"Yes--that was the way you treated me," Miss Cookham as plainly replied.

But he let this pass; his thought had already got away from it. "What
good then--its having been for me--has that ever done me?"

"Doesn't it do you any good _now?_" his friend returned. To which she
added, with another dim play of her tormented brightness, before he
could speak: "But if you won't even have your tea----!"

He had in fact touched nothing and, if he could have explained, would
have pleaded very veraciously that his appetite, keen when he came in,
had somehow suddenly failed. It was beyond eating or drinking, what she
seemed to want him to take from her. So if he looked, before him, over
the array, it was to say, very grave and graceless: "Am I to understand
that you offer to repay me?"

"I offer to repay you with interest, Herbert Dodd"--and her emphasis of
the great word was wonderful.

It held him in his place a minute, and held his eyes upon her; after
which, agitated too sharply to sit still, he pushed back his chair and
stood up. It was as if mere distress or dismay at first worked in him,
and was in fact a wave of deep and irresistible emotion which made him,
on his feet, sway as in a great trouble and then, to correct it,
throw himself stiffly toward the window, where he stood and looked out
unseeing. The road, the wide terrace beyond, the seats, the eternal sea
beyond that, the lighted lamps now flaring in the October night-wind,
with the few dispers