f. This made for him a pang and almost an anguish;
the fear of her saying something yet again that would wretchedly prove
how little he moved her perception. So his eyes, of remonstrant, of
suppliant intention, met hers close, at the same time that these, so far
from shrinking, but with their quite other swimming plea all bedimmed
now, seemed almost to wash him with the tears of her failure. He
soothed, he stroked, he reassured her hands, for tender conveyance of
his meaning, quite as she had just before dealt with his own for brave
demonstration of hers. It was during these instants as if the question
had been which of them _could_ most candidly and fraternally plead.
Full but of that she kept it up. "Ah, if you'd only think, if you'd only
try----!"

He couldn't stand it--she was capable of believing he had edged away,
excusing himself and trumping up a factitious theory, because he hadn't
the wit, hadn't the hand, to knock off the few pleasant pages she asked
him for and that any proper Frenchman, master of the _metier_, would
so easily and gallantly have promised. Should she so begin to commit
herself he'd, by the immortal gods, anticipate it in the manner most
admirably effective--in fact he'd even thus make her further derogation
impossible. Their faces were so close that he could practise any rich
freedom--even though for an instant, while the back of the chauffeur
guarded them on that side and his own presented breadth, amplified
by his loose mantle, filled the whole window-space, leaving him no
observation from any quarter to heed, he uttered, in a deep-drawn final
groan, an irrepressible echo of his pang for what might have been,
the muffled cry of his insistence. "You _are_ Romance!"--he drove it
intimately, inordinately home, his lips, for a long moment, sealing
it, with the fullest force of authority, on her own; after which, as
he broke away and the car, starting again, turned powerfully across
the pavement, he had no further sound from her than if, all divinely
indulgent but all humanly defeated, she had given the question up,
falling back to infinite wonder. He too fell back, but could still wave
his hat for her as she passed to disappearance in the great floridly
framed aperture whose wings at once came together behind her.

A ROUND OF VISITS

I

HE had been out but once since his arrival, Mark Monteith; that was
the next day after--he had disembarked by night on the previous; then
eve