him, I think, just as I do," she went on, "because no
one understands how wonderfully good he really is. He's so good," she
finished almost triumphantly, as if she had overcome by her assertion a
point which he disputed, "that there are times when he makes me feel
positively wicked."

Having no answer ready but a smile, he gave her this pleasantly enough,
so that she might take it, if she chose, for a complete agreement.
Though his heart was filled with repressed tenderness, there was nothing
further now that he could say to her, for he realised as he looked into
her face, that there was little room in her happiness either for his
tenderness or for himself. An aversion, too, to meeting Kemper awoke in
him, and so, after a few minutes of trivial conversation, he rose and
held out his hand.

"I'm very busy just now, so I may not see you again for quite awhile,"
he said at parting, "but remember if ever you should want me that I am
always waiting."

A little later, as he walked up the street in the June sunshine, he saw
Kemper's new automobile spinning rapidly from the direction of Fifth
Avenue.

CHAPTER III

THE GREATEST OF THESE

For a minute after Kemper had passed in his car, Adams turned back and
stood looking down the long street filled with pleasant June sunshine.
In the distance a hand-organ was grinding out a jerky sentimental air,
and beside him, at the corner by which he stood, a crippled vender of
fruit had halted his little cart of oranges and apples.

A year ago Adams might have told himself, in the despair of ignorance,
that since Laura had given her love to Kemper she was lost to him
forever. But he had learned now that this could not be true--that she
was too closely knit into his destiny to separate herself entirely from
it; and there came to him, while he stood there, a strange mystic
assurance that she would some day feel that she had need of him again.
His love had passed triumphantly through its first earthly stages, and
in the large impassioned yearning with which he thought of her there
was, so far as he himself was conscious, but little left of a sharper
personal desire. All desire, indeed, which has its root in the physical
craving for possession seemed to have gone out of him in the last few
months; and since the earliest dawn of that deeper consciousness within
his soul, he had almost ceased to think of himself as an isolated
individual life.

To let go the personal was to fa