her.

"Rose," he said, "you're a darling."

"Am I?" She was radiant.

"I am going to think up the things lovers have said, and read Solomon's
Song, maybe! But now I'm going back to the plantation, to let the
Almighty God and the undergods have a chance to tell me how to give you
up."

"Ask them now, Osmond," she breathed. "Ask here, while I am here to
answer, too."

"No," said Osmond. He shook his head. "Not while we are together. I
can't listen to Him."

* * * * *

In the road he met Peter. They stopped, and Peter said at once,--

"I've got three orders from New York. When they're finished, I'm going
back to France."

Osmond could not at once recall himself, even for his boy. Peter seemed
only a figure of the night, familiarly dear, and yet unrelated to the
great dream that swept across the sky with banners. Peter spoke again
bluntly.

"I shall paint again all right. You needn't worry. It's got hold of me."

Then they shook hands.

XXXI

Osmond went back to his little house, not to sleep, but to think. The
old habit of his life was changed. Henceforward, whether he took a
woman's love or left it, things would not be the same. Say she loved him
with the enduring passion of a woman at her best, could he let her
undertake the half of his strange lot? Could he cut her off from a
thousand sources of happiness to be found in the world she knew, even
though he forced her to go out into that world and sing, and lessened
his claim on her to a swallow flight now and then back to his waiting
heart? If her lot were to be a public one, she would have, in a measure,
to make it herself; for here was he, with his plants and trees, almost
one of them, and he could not give up his hardy life, lest he dwindle
and fail utterly. Besides, this was his business, as music was hers.
Whatever communion they had, it could never be a unison of pursuits, but
rather an interchange of rich devotion. It looked, he concluded, very
bad for her.

As he thought that, the night grew chill, and the stars waned in their
shining. These were the dull old ways of a world that had swung so long
in one orbit that it could never be otherwise. He was bringing the woman
to break bitter bread with him, and though she ate it cheerfully in the
morning of her hope, it would seem intolerable in the evening, and at
night she might refuse it utterly. What right had he to let her vow
herself to such things and swe