oman who has everything to
offer to the one man in her life. She had felt as she had looked:
almost a girl, with music on her lips and joyous things in her heart,
nursing that wonderful gift to her sex,--the hopeless optimism begotten
of love. And her little house of cards had tumbled so quickly to the
ground, the little denouement on which she had counted had fallen so
flat. They two were there alone. The little dinner which she had
planned was as near perfection as possible. The champagne bubbled in
their glasses. The soft light, the solitude, the stillness,--nothing
had failed her, except the man. Stephen sat within a few feet of her,
with furrowed brow and mind absorbed by a possible political problem.

Nora made coffee at the table, but they drank it seated in great easy
chairs drawn up to the fire. She passed him silently a box of his
favourite brand of cigarettes. Perhaps that evidence of her
forethought, the mute resignation of her restrained conversation with
its attempted note of cheerfulness forced its way through the chinks of
his unnatural armour. His whole face suddenly softened. He leaned
across and took her fingers into his.

"Dear Nora," he sighed, "what a brute I must seem to you and how
difficult it is for me to try and tell you all that is in my heart!"

"All tasks that are worth attempting are difficult," she murmured.
"Please go on."

"They are such simple things that I feel," he began, "simple and yet
contradictory. I should miss you more out of my life than any other
person. I shall resent from my very soul the man who takes you from me.
And yet I know what life is, dear. I know how inexorable are its
decrees. You have a fancy for me, born of kindness and sympathy,
because you know that I am a little lonely. In our thoughts, too, we
live so much in the same world. That is just one of the ironies of
life, Nora. Our thoughts can move linked together through all the
flowery and beautiful places of the world, but our bodies--alas, dear!
Do you know how old I really am?"

"I know how young you are," she answered, with a little choke in her
throat.

"I am fifty-four years old," he went on. "I am in the last lap of
physical well-being, even though my mind should continue to flourish.
And you are--how much younger! I dare not think."

"Idiot!" she exclaimed. "At fifty-four you are better and stronger than
half the men of forty."

"I have good health," he admitted, "but no constitution or manner