omen's an omen."

"You'd be afraid--?"

"Per Bacco!"

"For your happiness?"

"For my happiness."

"For your safety?"

"For my safety."

She just paused. "For your marriage?"

"For my marriage. For everything."

She thought again. "Thank goodness then that if there BE a crack we know
it! But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don't know--!" And
she smiled with the sadness of it. "We can never then give each other
anything."

He considered, but he met it. "Ah, but one does know. _I_ do, at
least--and by instinct. I don't fail. That will always protect me."

It was funny, the way he said such things; yet she liked him, really,
the more for it. They fell in for her with a general, or rather with a
special, vision. But she spoke with a mild despair.

"What then will protect ME?"

"Where I'm concerned _I_ will. From me at least you've nothing to fear,"
he now quite amiably responded. "Anything you consent to accept from
me--" But he paused.

"Well?"

"Well, shall be perfect."

"That's very fine," she presently answered. "It's vain, after all, for
you to talk of my accepting things when you'll accept nothing from me."

Ah, THERE, better still, he could meet her. "You attach an impossible
condition. That, I mean, of my keeping your gift so to myself."

Well, she looked, before him there, at the condition--then,
abruptly, with a gesture, she gave it up. She had a headshake of
disenchantment--so far as the idea had appealed to her. It all appeared
too difficult. "Oh, my 'condition'--I don't hold to it. You may cry it
on the housetops--anything I ever do."

"Ah well, then--!" This made, he laughed, all the difference.

But it was too late. "Oh, I don't care now! I SHOULD have liked the
Bowl. But if that won't do there's nothing."

He considered this; he took it in, looking graver again; but after a
moment he qualified. "Yet I shall want some day to give you something."

She wondered at him. "What day?"

"The day you marry. For you WILL marry. You must--SERIOUSLY--marry."

She took it from him, but it determined in her the only words she was
to have uttered, all the morning, that came out as if a spring had been
pressed. "To make you feel better?"

"Well," he replied frankly, wonderfully--"it will. But here," he added,
"is your hansom."

He had signalled--the cab was charging. She put out no hand for their
separation, but she prepared to get in. Before she did so, however, she
said what