no protest.

They talked, all things considered, with surprising calmness, and at
length Morgan glanced down and, seeing on the table near his hand the
plans for the house they had meant to build, picked them up absently,
glanced at them and tossed them back. It was the gesture of accepting a
finality.

"I suppose, Anne," he said, with a rather more than merely decent
assumption of whatever fault existed, "I've refused to see the truth
because I was blindly selfish, but I couldn't seek to hold you--if it
costs you both happiness and self-respect." He paused and then added. "I
ask only one thing, now. Don't make this decision final. Think it over
for three months--"

"Morgan dear," she interrupted in a gasping voice, "for more than three
months, I've thought of nothing else."

"I know." The gentleness of his speech was the more telling by its
contrast with his aggressive habit of self-assertion. "But you were
thinking then with a sense of being bound. Complete freedom may make a
difference. At least leave me that hope."

"I'm afraid," she faltered, "I'm very certain."

"Anyway," he reminded her, as he forced a rueful smile, "it will be
easier to tell your mother in that fashion. She is on my side, you
know."

Possibly Morgan had long ago counted this over-ardent advocacy on the
part of Mrs. Masters as a hurtful partisanship. He knew that Anne's
spirit had been fretted, ragged under the maternal insistence, even when
it was tempered with finesse. He knew too that in this final declaration
of freedom, the girl could not escape the knowledge that for her mother
as well as herself she was wrecking every provident prospect and raising
the ghosts of shabby, genteel poverty.

"I think," said Morgan, with a delicacy of tact which one would hardly
have expected from him, "you'd better let me tell her--that we've
decided to wait until I come back from abroad."

Anne sickened at the thought of her mother's disappointment and at the
thought too of how, for her, the future was to be met. Then as if that
were too gigantic a problem, her mind veered to lesser, yet disturbing,
complications.

Today's papers had printed advance details of the wedding. The type of
one heading seemed to stand at the moment before her eyes, "Happy Event
of Interest to Society," but when she spoke somewhat timidly of these
things to Morgan he contemptuously waved them aside.

"Damn the invitations and the wedding guests," he exclaimed. "We wer