you can sleep on this divan."

"If that is a polite hint, I am ready to take it. I have been here long
enough."

"Oh, but I mean it. I will not hear of you riding back in this pitch
darkness. You would be more likely to go into the marsh than not. You
can return to Rosewater so late to-morrow that Sister Ann will infer you
have made a morning call."

"I shall return to-night. It was as dark when I came, and I am not
altogether a fool. Neither is my horse."

"But you are not so familiar with the road," murmured Isabel,
irrepressibly.

"That is the one decent thing you have said to me to-night. It is these
sudden lapses into the wholly feminine that save me from despair. What a
night for romance, and you and I sparring like two prize-fighters! That
is as far as we have ever got. If you would ever let me know
you--sometimes I have an odd fancy that I can see a lamp burning in your
breast, and that if ever I got at it, and searched all the nooks and
crannies of your strange nature by its light, I should love you as
profoundly as it is possible for a man to love a woman."

"I am afraid it is only a taper in a cup of oil. At all events it is not
a search-light, even to myself. I fancy people only seem complicated to
others when they do not wholly understand themselves."

"Do you understand yourself?"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Are you perfectly satisfied that you never could love me?"

She reddened and her sensitive mouth moved, but she brought her teeth
together. "That has nothing to do with it."

"Everything!"

"Nothing!"

"Do you mean to tell me that you are literally contented with your life
as it is?--living out here alone with nothing to do but read and look
after those confounded chickens? You have the most romantic temperament
I have ever met, and the way you gratify it would make an elephant
laugh."

"I dream and think of the future."

"Future? You saw what that amounted to when you were in town--"

"I have shaken off the impression. It must have been that I had too much
at once--and the purely frivolous, which offended my puritanical
streak--"

"You don't like the Bohemian crowd any better."

"There are plenty of others. When I am ready I shall make the plunge and
forbid myself to shrink from realities--"

"And the only people that will interest you will be those deep in public
affairs. A woman to be a political power must be married. Otherwise she
becomes the worst sort of feminine int