e be without me?"

"I don't dare to think," she was too earnest to take his jest with
lightness, "it is strange, isn't it?--that but for you I should never
have known--this."

"Who can tell? There might have come along another fellow and you'd
probably have made love quite as prettily to a substitute."

"Never!" she shook her head with an indignant protest, "and you?" she
added softly after a moment.

"And I? What?"

"Without me could you have felt it quite like this?"

She waited breathlessly, but the ironic spirit had got the better of his
tenderness.

"My dear girl," he rejoined, "what a question?"

"But could you?--tell me," she implored in sudden passion.

"Well, I devoutly hope so," he answered lightly, "it's a thing I
should'nt like to have missed, you know."

He leaned back closing his eyes; and immediately, without warning and
against his will, there rose before him the seductive face of Madame
Alta, and he recalled her exquisite voice, with its peculiar high note
of piercing sweetness. Then he remembered his wife, and, one by one, the
other women whom he had loved and forgotten or merely forgotten without
loving. They meant so little in his existence now, and yet once, each in
her own bad time had engrossed utterly his senses. In what rare quality
of sentiment could this love differ from those lesser loves that had
gone before?

But he was not given to introspection, and so the disturbing question
left him almost as readily as it had come. When one attempted to think
things out, there was no hope of escaping the endless circle with a
clear head. No, he wasn't analytical, thank Heaven!

While he was still rejoicing in what he called his "practical turn of
mind," he remembered suddenly an appointment at his club which he had
made a week ago and then overlooked in the absorbing interest of his
engagement.

"By Jove, you'll get me into an awful scrape some day," he remarked
cheerfully as he hurried into his overcoat. "I might have lost fifty
thousand dollars by letting this thing slip."

His manner had changed completely with the awakened recollection; and
finance in all its forms--the look of figures, the clink of coin--had
assumed instantly the position of romance in his thoughts. For the
moment Laura was crowded from his mind, and she recognised this with a
pang sharp and cold as the thrust of a dagger.

"If you only knew how much you'd nearly cost me," were his last words as
he ran down the