eat deal," he said, "but I shall be content with a very
little."

"With my whole faith--with all my friendship," she replied; and as she
spoke the words, her heart contracted with a spasm which was almost that
of terror of the unknown purpose to which she felt, with a kind of
superstitious blindness, that she was pledged. Fate had offered her
this one good thing, and she must put it from her because she waited in
absolute ignorance--for what? For love it might be, and yet her woman's
instinct taught her that the only love which endures is the love of age
that has never been young for youth so elastic that it can never grow
old. Then swift as the flash of self-revelation she saw in imagination
the eager yet humble look with which Arnold Kemper had waited before her
door, and, though she insisted still that the picture displeased her
fancy, she knew that passion to meet response in her must come to her
clothed in a virile strength like his.

"I wish from my soul that it might have been," she murmured, but even
with the words she knew that she had all her life wished for a different
thing--for a love that was wholly unlike the love he offered.

"It has been," he answered, while his grave gentleness fell like dew on
the smouldering fire in his eyes. "It has been, my dear, and it will be
always until I die."

CHAPTER IX

OF MASQUES AND MUMMERIES

In the afternoon of the next day Laura received by a special messenger
an urgent appeal from Gerty Bridewell.

"Come to me at once," said the note, which appeared to have been written
in frantic haste. "I am in desperate trouble and I need you."

The distress of the writer was quite as apparent as the exaggeration,
and while Laura rolled rapidly toward her in a cab, she prepared herself
with a kind of nervous courage to bear the brunt of the inevitable
scene. Perry was at the bottom of it she knew--she had answered such
summonses often enough before to pre-figure with unerring insight the
nature of the event. He had shown his periodical inclination to a fresh
affair, his errant fancy had wandered in a particular direction, and
Gerty's epicurean philosophy had failed as usual to account for the
concrete fact. To Laura the amazing part was not so much Perry's
fickleness, which she had brought herself to accept with tolerant
aversion, as the extraordinary value Gerty placed upon an emotion which
was kept alive by an artifice at once so evident and so ineffectual.
Ther