r even had a real talk about it before!... I
told you once that you were more generous than--"

"No, I'm never generous enough. That's my trouble, among others.... But
if you think that it's a nice and happy thing for us to be putting up
this building, I want you please always to remember ... that you've done
it all yourself."

There was a tense silence, out of which his voice spoke, no longer with
any trace of humor.

"Don't be polite.... I couldn't quite stand it. Do you mean that?"

"It's all a failure if you won't believe that I do."

"Then I do believe it."

This time the silence ran somewhat longer, and again it was V.V.'s
voice, greatly stirred, that broke it.

"I don't understand, but I do believe it.... And it makes me pretty
proud. By George, pretty proud!... Why--I've talked a lot--but it's the
first thing I've ever accomplished! _The first thing_...."

His voice showed that his mind had swept away from her, over spaces; and
Cally raised her eyes and looked at him. He sat gazing wide-eyed into
the dull-green glow of her lamp, on his face a curious and moving look;
a look humbled yet exalted, gloriously wondering, and to her the
wistfullest thing she had ever seen in her life. He, who had given away
his patrimony, who was giving away his life every day with a will,
thought that this was the first thing....

All that was sweetest in the girl, all that was maternal and
understanding, rose fiercely within her, stormed her with a desire to
mother this man, to protect him from his own royal yet somehow
infinitely sad self-denials. For this moment she felt far stronger than
he. His hand, with the pencil in it, lay on the table close by her, and
Cally closed her slim fingers over it with a firm clasp.

"Ah, don't say that, Mr. V.V.--don't look that way. It hurts me, in my
heart.... Can't I make you believe that you've accomplished more than
anybody else in the world?..."

He did not move at the shock of her touch, at the sound of his little
name upon these unaccustomed lips. She was aware only of a subtle
contraction, a sort of tightening going on somewhere within him. So
Cally finished her small speech with her hand over his. But at just that
point, a stir seemed to shake through the man; he was seen to be turning
his head; and in the same breath, her moment of high strength broke
abruptly. The veins fluttered queerly in the forward hand; she felt a
quick flush rising somewhere within, spreading and tin