it was being modernly renewed, was enough to
set him off for it. It was so near now, that since the announcement of
their engagement in September, he had moved through all its obligations
benumbed by the white, blinding flash thrown backward from its
consummating moment, the moment of her cry to him, of their welding at
the core of light and harmony, bounded inevitably by the approaching
date of marriage. It had been, he recalled on some one of those
occasions of social approval by which it appeared engagements in the
Best Society proceeded, that he had sat thus, waiting until the clock
ticked on the moment when he might properly join her, sat so full of the
sense of her that for the instant he accepted her unannounced appearance
at the darkened doorway as the mere extension of his white-heated
fancy. The next moment as she charged into the circle of the lamp he saw
that the umbra of some strange electrical excitement hung about her. It
fairly crackled between them as he rose hurriedly to his feet.

"You have come, Eunice! You have come----"

But he saw well enough what she had come for. She laid the case on the
table, but as she tugged impatiently at her glove, the fringe of her
wrap caught the clasp of it and scattered the jewels on the cloth. She
tried then to put the ring beside them, but her hand shook so that it
fell and rolled upon the floor behind them. Peter picked it up quietly,
but he did not offer it to her hand again.

"I have come," said Eunice, "to say what in my mother's house I was
afraid of being interrupted in saying; what you must see, what my mother
won't see."

"I see you are greatly excited about something!"

"I'm not, I'm not.... That is ... I am, but not in the way you think,"
she was sharp with insistence; "that is what you and mother always say,
that I'm nervous or excited, and all the time you don't _see_."

"What is it I don't see, Eunice?"

"That I can't stand it, that I can't go on with it, that it is dreadful
to me,--_dreadful!_"

"What is dreadful?"

"Everything, being engaged--being married and giving up...." It was
fairly racked out of her by some inward torture to which he had not the
key.

"Of course, Eunice, if you don't wish to be married so soon----" Peter
was all at sea. He brought a chair for her, and perceiving that he would
go on standing as long as she did, she sat upon the edge of it but kept
both the arms as a measure of defence. The slight act of doing somethin