hink
--you won't," she exclaimed, with a fleeting smile.

"Well, what is it?" he assented. "You might as well get it off now."

And it took all her strength to say: "I don't see how I can marry you.
I've told you the reasons. You're rich, and you have friends who wouldn't
understand--and your children--they wouldn't understand. I--I'm nothing,
I know it isn't right, I know you wouldn't be happy. I've never lived--in
the kind of house you live in and known the kind of people you know, I
shouldn't know what to do."

He took his eyes off the road and glanced down at her curiously. His
smile was self-confident, exultant.

"Now do you feel better--you little Puritan?" he said.

And perforce she smiled in return, a pucker appearing between her
eyebrows.

"I mean it," she said. "I came out to tell you so. I know--it just isn't
possible."

"I'd marry you to-day if I could get a license," he declared. "Why,
you're worth any woman in America, I don't care who she is, or how much
money she has."

In spite of herself she was absurdly pleased.

"Now that is over, we won't discuss it again, do you understand? I've got
you," he said, "and I mean to hold on to you."

She sighed. He was driving slowly now along the sandy road, and with his
hand on hers she simply could not think. The spell of his nearness, of
his touch, which all nature that morning conspired to deepen, was too
powerful to be broken, and something was calling to her, "Take this day,
take this day," drowning out the other voice demanding an accounting. She
was living--what did it all matter? She yielded herself to the witchery
of the hour, the sheer delight of forthfaring into the unknown.

They turned away from the river, crossing the hills of a rolling country
now open, now wooded, passing white farmhouses and red barns, and
ancient, weather-beaten dwellings with hipped roofs and "lean-tos" which
had been there in colonial days when the road was a bridle-path. Cows and
horses stood gazing at them from warm paddocks, where the rich, black mud
glistened, melted by the sun; chickens scratched and clucked in the
barnyards or flew frantically across the road, sometimes within an ace of
destruction. Janet flinched, but Ditmar would laugh, gleefully, boyishly.

"We nearly got that one!" he would exclaim. And then he had to assure her
that he wouldn't run over them.

"I haven't run over one yet,--have I?" he would demand.

"No, but you will, it's only luck."