er her decision. But Toni could
bear no more. With a quick, passionate movement she opened the big door
hurriedly, and, heedless of his whining, passed through blindly into the
night, pulling the door to after her with the miserable, hopeless
feelings of a traitor in her heart.

Pausing for an instant she heard Jock sniffing interrogatively beneath
the door; and knew he was hoping desperately that it would open to give
him freedom; but with the tears running down her face she went slowly
down the steps and was swallowed up by the cold, wet fog which lurked,
ghost-like, round the house.

Leonard Dowson was waiting for her, impatiently, feverishly, by the car;
but one glance at her warned him that this was no time for lover-like
protestations.

He helped her in, covering her with the big fur rug he had had the
forethought to bring; and then, with a delicacy which could only have
been taught him by love, he left her alone in the interior of the car
and mounted the seat beside the chauffeur.

Even now he could hardly believe his good-fortune. With all his
education, his later Socialistic tendencies, his conviction that one man
was as good, primarily, as another, and that only brains and application
counted in the race of life, he could never bring himself to look on
Toni as an ordinary human being, inferior to him by reason of her sex,
her less scientific brain, her lack of the power, mental and physical,
which was, to him, the prerogative of manhood.

Other women he might judge contemptuously or admiringly, as the case
might be. But he could never consider Toni as a woman like those
others--possibly because to him she was not _a_ woman, but--mystical
distinction!--_the_ woman. In a vague, unreasoning way he recognized
Toni's limitations. She was not clever, not even what he called
well-educated. She would never fill any important position in the world,
would never shine in any public capacity, would never seek to usurp
man's prerogatives, and would be content to live quietly in some little
corner of the world without longing to dash into the battlefield of
human desires and human conflicts, as other women were doing every day.

But through it all Toni was the one woman he loved, the woman who
represented to him all that was loveliest and best of her sex; and this
narrow-chested, narrow-minded and quite unattractive young dentist had
this much of greatness in his soul, that he could love a woman
completely.

The ca