omething more conventional--such
as I'd been trained for.... It was only by degrees that I came to see
that there were big things to live for--as well as little.... It's all
so wonderful!--so mysterious! I can't tell!... I only know that now--"

He withdrew his hand, looking troubled.

"Are you--are you--_sure?_"

She reflected a minute. "I know what makes you ask that. You think I've
changed too suddenly. If so, I can explain it."

The silence in which he waited for her to continue assented in some sort
to this reading of his thoughts.

"It isn't that I've changed," she said, at last, speaking thoughtfully,
"so much as that I've wakened to a sense of what's real for me as
distinguished from what's been forced and artificial. You may understand
me better if I say that in leading my life up to--up to recently, I've
been like a person at a play--a play in which the situations are
interesting and the characters sympathetic, but which becomes like a
dream the minute you leave the theater and go home. I feel that--that
with you--I've--I've got home."

He would have said something, but she hurried on.

"I've not changed toward the play, except to recognize the fact that it
_was_ a play--for me. I knew it the instant I began to learn about
papa's troubles. That was like a summons to me, like a call. When it
came, everything else--the things I'd been taught to strive for and the
people whom I had supposed to be the only ones worth living with, grew
distant and shadowy, as though they belonged to a picture or a book. It
seemed to me that I woke then for the first time to a realization of the
life going on about me here in my own country, and to a sense of my
share in it. If I hadn't involved myself so much--and involved some one
else with me--my duty would have been clearer from the start. But
Colonel Ashley's been so noble!--he's understood me so well!--he's
helped me so much to understand myself!--that I can't help honoring him,
honoring him with my whole heart, even if I see now that I don't--that I
never did--care for him in the way--"

She pressed her handkerchief to her lips to keep back what might have
become a sob.

"Did you know I--I loved you?" he asked, still speaking hoarsely.

"I thought you must," she said, simply. "I used to say I hoped you
didn't--but deep down in my heart--"

He got up and strode to the window, where, with his back to her, he
stared awhile at the last cold glimmer of the sun set. Hi