imed, and the trivial words
were almost an offence against the emotional dignity of the moment.

She rose to her feet, stretching out her hand until she stood as if
keeping him at a distance by the mere fragile tips of her fingers.

"If I love you, I shall love you very, very much," she said.

With a laugh he bent his lips against her hand. "You'll never love me
half so much as I love you, you bit of thistledown," he answered.

"It will be either a great happiness or a greater misery," she went on,
hesitating, retreating, as she withdrew her hands and pressed them upon
her bosom.

"There's no misery any more--it is the beginning of life," he rejoined.

She laughed softly, a little tender, yielding laugh; then at the very
instant when he would have caught her in his arms, she slipped quickly
back until her desk came between them.

"You must give me time--I must think before I let myself care too much,"
she said.

In the end she gave him her promise and he went from her with a rare and
vivid feeling of exhilaration. For the time he told himself that he
wanted her more than he remembered ever to have wanted anything in his
whole life; and his sated emotion of a man of pleasure, responded with
all the lost intensity of youth. Was it credible that he was already
middle-aged--was already growing a little bald? he demanded, with a
genuine delight in the discovery that his senses were still alive.

On his way up to his rooms, he dropped, by habit, into his club, and
after a word or two with several men whom he seldom met, he crossed over
to join Perry Bridewell, who sat in an exhausted attitude in a leather
chair beside the window. Outside a stream of carriages, containing
richly dressed women moved up Fifth Avenue, dividing as it approached
the mounted police at the corner, and Perry, as Kemper went up to him,
was following with a dulled fish-like glance the pronounced figure of a
lady who held the reins over a handsome pair of bays.

"That's a fine figure of a woman--look at her hips," he observed, with
relish, as Kemper stopped beside him.

"I saw her yesterday. Gerty says she's terrific form," commented Kemper,
gazing to where the object of their admiration vanished in a crush of
vehicles.

"Oh, they always say that of a woman with any figure to speak of,"
remarked Perry. "Unless she's as flat as an ironing board, somebody is
sure to say she's vulgar. For my part I like shape," he concluded with
emphasis.

A