sat there in ecstatic silence, with his eyes on her slender figure in
its soft black gown, he told himself that the morning's happy promise
united them in a close, an indissoluble bond of fellowship. He saw her
always under the literary glamour--he felt the full charm of the poetic
genius--the impassioned idealism which she expressed, and it became
almost impossible for him to detach the personality of the woman herself
from the personality of the writer whom he felt, after all, to be the
more intimately vivid of the two.

"I knew you'd be," he repeated, and this time he spoke with a passionate
assurance. "If you hadn't been I'd have found the whole thing
worthless."

She looked up still smiling, and he watched her large, beautiful
forehead, on which the firelight played as on a mirror. "Well, one's
friends do add zest to the pleasure," she returned.

For a moment he hesitated; then leaning forward he spoke with a
desperate resolve. "One's friends--yes--but you have been more than a
friend to me since the beginning--since the first day. You have been
everything. I could not have lived without you."

He saw her curved brows draw quickly together, and she bent upon him a
look in which he read pity, surprise and a slight tinge of amusement.
"Oh, you poor boy, is it possible that you imagine all this?" she asked.

"I imagine nothing," he answered with a wounded and despairing
indignation, "but I have loved you--I have dreamed of you--I have lived
for you since the first moment that I saw you."

"Then you have been behaving very foolishly," she commented, "for what
you are in love with is a shadow--a poem, a fancy that isn't myself at
all. The real truth is," she pursued, with a decision which cut him to
the heart, "that you are in love with a literary reputation and you
imagine that it's a woman. Why, I'm not only older than you in years,
I'm older in soul, older in a thousand lives. There is nothing foolish
about me, nothing pink and white and fleshly perfect--nothing that a
boy like you could hold to for a day--"

She broke off and sat staring into the fire with a troubled and brooding
look--a look which seemed to lose the fact of his presence in some more
absorbing vision at which she gazed. He noticed even in his misery that
she had suffered during the last few weeks an obscure, a mysterious
change--it was as if the flame-like suggestion, which had always
belonged to her personality, had of late gathered warmth,