ther for a while?" she asked. "To be engaged is
a pleasure that comes but once; it would be a pity to cut it too short."

"It is a pleasure that I would cheerfully dispense with," he replied,
"for the certainty of possession. I want you all to myself, and all the
time. Things might happen. If I should die, for instance, before I
married you"--

"Oh, don't suppose such awful things," she cried, putting her hand over
his mouth.

He held it there and kissed it until she pulled it away.

"I should consider," he resumed, completing the sentence, "that my life
had been a failure."

"If I should die," she murmured, "I should die happy in the knowledge
that you had loved me."

"In three weeks," he went on, "I shall have finished my business in
Clarence, and there will be but one thing to keep me here. When shall
it be? I must take you home with me."

"I will let you know," she replied, with a troubled sigh, "in a week
from to-day."

"I'll call your attention to the subject every day in the mean time,"
he asserted. "I shouldn't like you to forget it."

Rena's shrinking from the irrevocable step of marriage was due to a
simple and yet complex cause. Stated baldly, it was the consciousness
of her secret; the complexity arose out of the various ways in which it
seemed to bear upon her future. Our lives are so bound up with those
of our fellow men that the slightest departure from the beaten path
involves a multiplicity of small adjustments. It had not been
difficult for Rena to conform her speech, her manners, and in a measure
her modes of thought, to those of the people around her; but when this
readjustment went beyond mere externals and concerned the vital issues
of life, the secret that oppressed her took on a more serious aspect,
with tragic possibilities. A discursive imagination was not one of her
characteristics, or the danger of a marriage of which perfect frankness
was not a condition might well have presented itself before her heart
had become involved. Under the influence of doubt and fear acting upon
love, the invisible bar to happiness glowed with a lambent flame that
threatened dire disaster.

"Would he have loved me at all," she asked herself, "if he had known
the story of my past? Or, having loved me, could he blame me now for
what I cannot help?"

There were two shoals in the channel of her life, upon either of which
her happiness might go to shipwreck. Since leaving the house behind
the c