ly.

"If you had only realized it! If you had only realized that all I wanted
of you was to be yourself. It wasn't what you achieved. I didn't want you
to be like Ralph or the others."

"Myself? What are you trying to say?"

"Yourself. Yes, that is what I like about you. If you hadn't been in such
a hurry--if you hadn't misjudged me so. It was the power in you, the
craving, the ideal in you that I cared for--not the fruits of it. The
fruits would have come naturally. But you forced them, Hugh, for quicker
results."

"What kind of fruits?" I asked.

"Ah," she exclaimed, "how can I tell what they might have been! You have
striven and striven, you have done extraordinary things, but have they
made you any happier? have you got what you want?"

I stooped down and seized her wrists from behind her head.

"I want you, Nancy," I said. "I have always wanted you. You're more
wonderful to-day than you have ever been. I could find myself--with you."

She closed her eyes. A dreamy smile was on her face, and she lay
unresisting, very still. In that tremendous moment, for which it seemed I
had waited a lifetime, I could have taken her in my arms--and yet I did
not. I could not tell why: perhaps it was because she seemed to have
passed beyond me--far beyond--in realization. And she was so still!

"We have missed the way, Hugh," she whispered, at last.

"But we can find it again, if we seek it together," I urged.

"Ah, if I only could!" she said. "I could have once. But now I'm
afraid--afraid of getting lost." Slowly she straightened up, her hands
falling into her lap. I seized them again, I was on my knees in front of
her, before the fire, and she, intent, looking down at me, into me,
through me it seemed--at something beyond which yet was me.

"Hugh," she asked, "what do you believe? Anything?"

"What do I believe?"

"Yes. I don't mean any cant, cut-and-dried morality. The world is getting
beyond that. But have you, in your secret soul, any religion at all? Do
you ever think about it? I'm not speaking about anything orthodox, but
some religion--even a tiny speck of it, a germ--harmonizing with life,
with that power we feel in us we seek to express and continually
violate."

"Nancy!" I exclaimed.

"Answer me--answer me truthfully," she said....

I was silent, my thoughts whirling like dust atoms in a storm.

"You have always taken things--taken what you wanted. But they haven't
satisfied you, convinced you that t