tood in her eyes, and would perhaps have undone
his hurt but that he was staring into the fire.

"How can you be of use," he said, almost irritably, "in such ways as
those? They are not important, and I am not sure that for us they are
legitimate. If you were about to be--married"--he seemed to plunge at
the word--"I should not wish either to hasten you or to house you. I
should turn my back on it all. You should have nothing from me," he went
on, with a forced smile, "but my blessing, delivered over my shoulder."

"I am sure they are not important," she said humbly--privately all
unwilling to give up her martyrdom, "but surely they are legitimate. I
would like to help you in every little way I can. Don't you like me in
your life? You have said that I may stay."

"I believe you think that by taking strong measures one can exorcise
things," he said. "That if we could only write out this history of ours
in our hearts' blood it would somehow vanish."

"No," she said, "but I should like to do it all the same."

"You must bear with me if I refuse the heroic in little. It is even
harder than the other." He broke off, leaning back and looking at
her from under his shading hand as if that might protect him from too
complete a vision. The firelight was warm on her cheek and hair, her
needle once again completed the dear delusion: she sat there, his wife.
This was an aspect he forbade, but it would return; here it was again.

"It is good to have you in my life," he said. "It is also good to
recognize one's possibilities."

"How can you definitely lose me?" she asked, and he shook his head.

"I don't know. Now that I have found you it is as if you and I had been
rocked together on the tide of that inconceivable ocean that casts us
half-awake upon life," he said dreamily. "It isn't friendship of ideas,
it's a friendship of spirit. Indeed, I hope and pray never wholly to
lose that."

"You never will," she told him. "How many worlds one lives in as the day
goes by with the different people one cares for--one beyond the other,
concentric, ringing from the heart! Yours comprises all the others; it
lies the farthest out--and alas! at present, the closest in," she added
irresistibly to the asking of his eyes.

"But," she hurried on, taking high ground to remedy her indiscretion,
"I look forward to the time when this--other feeling of ours will become
just an idea, as it is now just an emotion, at which we should try to
smile.