ine."

With a curious glance at Clayton the girl went on. Audrey smiled at him.

"Please don't run!" she said. "There are people looking. It would be so
conspicuous."

"Run!" he replied. He stood looking down at her, and at something in his
eyes her smile died.

"It's too wonderful, Clay."

For a moment he could not speak. After all those weeks of hunger for her
there was no power in him to dissemble. He felt a mad, boyish impulse to
hold out his arms to her, Malacca stick, gloves, and all!

"It's a bit of luck I hadn't expected, Audrey," he said, at last,
unsteadily.

She turned about quite simply, and faced in the direction he was going.

"I shall walk with you," she said, with a flash of her old impertinence.
"You have not asked me to, but I shall, anyhow. Only don't call this
luck. It isn't at all. I walk here every Sunday, and every Sunday I say
to myself--he will think he needs exercise. Then he will walk, and the
likeliest place for him to go is the park. Good reasoning, isn't it?"

She glanced up at him, but his face was set and unsmiling. "Don't pay
any attention to me, Clay. I'm a little mad, probably. You see"--she
hesitated--"I need my friends just now. And when the very best of them
all hides away from me?"

"Don't say that. I stayed away, because--" He hesitated.

"I'm almost through. Don't worry! But I was walking along before I met
Clare--I'll tell you about her presently--and I was saying to myself
that I thought God owed me something. I didn't know just what.
Happiness, maybe. I've been careless and all that, but I've never been
wicked. And yet I can look back, and count the really happy days of my
life on five fingers."

She held out one hand.

"Five fingers!" she repeated, "and I am twenty-eight. The percentage is
pretty low, you know."

"Perhaps you and I ask too much?"

He was conscious of her quick, searching glance.

"Oh! You feel that way, too? I mean--as I do, that it's all hardly worth
while? But you seem to have everything, Clay."

"You have one thing I lack. Youth."

"Youth! At twenty-eight!"

"You can still mold your life, Audrey dear. You have had a bad time,
but--with all reverence to Chris's memory--his going out of it, under
the circumstances, is a grief. But it doesn't spell shipwreck."

"Do you mean that I will marry again?" she asked, in a low tone.

"Don't you think you will, some time? Some nice young chap who will
worship you all the days of his life? Th