his watch, leaned over, and kissed me on the forehead.

"'I'll barely make that boat,' he muttered, and rushed out."...

Philip was breathless. The strange, untold passion of the whole thing was
coming to him in waves of wonderful suggestion.

"Finish!" he cried impatiently. "Finish!"

"That is the end," she said. "I played for two years and a half, with
scarcely a pause. Then I came to Europe for a rest and travelled back
with you on the _Elletania_. Last night I saw Sylvanus Power again for
the first time. Don't speak. My story is in two halves. That is the
first. The second is just one question. That will come before we reach
home...John!" she called.

The man approached promptly--he was quite weary of throwing stones.

"Take us somewhere to lunch," his mistress directed, "and get back to New
York at six o'clock."

CHAPTER VIII

It was not until they were crossing Brooklyn Bridge, on their way into
the city, that she asked him that question. They crawled along, one of an
interminable, tangled line of vehicles of all sorts and conditions, the
trains rattling overhead, and endless streams of earnest people passing
along the footway. Below them, the evening sunlight flashed upon the
murky waters, glittered from the windows of the tall buildings, and shone
a little mercilessly upon the unlovely purlieus of the great human hive.
The wind had turned cool, and Elizabeth, with a little shiver, had drawn
her furs around her neck. All through the day, during the luncheon in an
unpretentious little inn, and the leisurely homeward drive, she had been
once more entirely herself, pleasant and sympathetic, ignoring absolutely
the intangible barrier which had grown up between them, soon to be thrown
down for ever or to remain for all time.

"We left our heroine," she said, "at an interesting crisis in her career.
I am waiting to hear from you--what would you have done in her place?"

He answered her at once, and he spoke from the lesser heights. He was
fiercely jealous.

"It is not a reasonable question," he declared. "I am not a woman. I am
just a man who has led an unusually narrow and cramped life until these
last few months."

"That is scarcely fair," she objected. "You profess to have loved--to
love still, I hope. That in itself makes a man of any one. Then you, too,
have sinned. You, too, are one of those who have yielded to passion of a
sort. Therefore, your judgment ought to be the better worth having."

H