ore!"

"Stop! in pity. If it does happen he'll not be to blame; it will be
because he can't help it. You're big and strong and he'll need you as
well as me. Wait."

The man drew back a step, but his great jaw was set immovably.

"You can't realize what you're asking," he said. "Remember my conviction
is not your conviction. I still believe that two predominate over one and
that nature's law comes first. I'll go because it is your decision and
final; but I can't change elemental things at command. Don't ask it or
expect it, because it is impossible."

"It's not impossible, though," desperately. "Nothing is impossible with
you."

Roberts' great head shook a negative.

"This is. I can't discuss it longer. Good-bye, Elice."

The girl's brown eyes followed him as, decisively now, he prepared to
leave, and in hopeless, abject misery. She spoke one word.

"Darley," she said.

The listener halted, motionless as a figure in clay.

"Darley," repeated the girl; and again that was all.

"'Darley!'" It was the man's voice this time, but it sounded as though
coming from a distance. "'Darley!' At last!--and now!"

"Darley," yet once again, "as I love you and you love me don't--desert me
now!"

On the room fell a silence like death,--to those two actors worse than
death; for it held thought infinite and complete realization at last of
what might have been and was not; of what as well, unless a miracle
intervened, could never be. In it they stood, each where he was, two
figures in clay instead of one. Interrupting, awakening, torturing,
sounded the thing they had so long expected; the impact of a step upon
the floor of the porch without; a moment later another, uncertain, and
another; a pause, and then, startlingly loud, the trill of an electric
bell.

For an instant neither stirred. It was the expected; and still there is a
limit to human endurance. The girl was trembling, in a nervous tension
too great to bear longer. An effort indeed she made at control; but it
was a pitiful effort and futile. In surrender absolute, abandon absolute,
she dropped back into her seat, her arms crossed pathetically on the
surface of the library table, her face buried from sight therein.

"Answer it, please," she pleaded. "I can't. I'm ashamed, unutterably; but
I can't!"

Again the alarm of the bell sounded; curtly short this time and
insistent.

Without a word or even a pause Darley Roberts obeyed. As he passed out he
closed the do