id of those we love, you know."

"Why should I love you?" she enquired gayly.

His pleasant irony was in his laugh. "Because you can't help
yourself--you're obliged to--it's your fate."

She frowned slightly. "I have no fate except the one I make for myself."

He bent toward her and this time his hand closed with determination upon
hers. "Well, you may make me what you please," he said.

Her hand fluttered like an imprisoned bird in his grasp, but he held it
with a pressure which sent the blood tingling sharply to the ends of her
fingers. His strength hurt her and yet she found a curious pleasure in
the very acuteness of her sensations.

"There's no use fighting," he said with a short laugh, "we can't help
ourselves. You'll have to marry me, so you may as well give in."

His tone was mocking, but she felt his tenderness as she had felt it a
moment before, resistless and enveloping. As she smiled up at him, he
bent quickly forward and kissed her brow and eyes and mouth, then
lifting her chin he kissed, also, the soft fulness of her throat. When
she put up her hands in protest, he crushed them back upon her bosom by
the strength of his lips.

She closed her eyes, yielding for one breathless instant to the passion
of his embrace. Her dream and her longing melted swiftly into
realisation, and she told herself that the agony of joy was sharper than
that of grief. This was like nothing that she had imagined, and she felt
an impulse to fly back into the uncertainty that she had left--to gain
time in which to prepare for the happiness which she told herself was
hers. Yet was it happiness? Her soul trembled as if from some almost
imperceptible shock of disillusionment, and she knew again the sense of
unreality which had come to her in the street on the day before. Again
she felt that she was in the midst of a singularly vivid dream from
which she would presently awake to life--and this dream seemed the
result of her dual nature, as if even her emotions belonged less to her
real existence than to an unconscious projection of thought.

The impulse to escape re-awoke in her, and yet she was clearly aware
that she would no sooner fly from him than her insatiable longing would
drive her back anew. His attraction appeared strangely the greater as
she withdrew the further from his actual presence, and she knew that if
he were absent from her for a day the uncertainty that he aroused would
become intolerable. "Does the soul tha