.

"I was going to tell you the other evening," he added, "but somehow the
opportunity slipped away."

Carrie was listening without attempting to reply. She could think of
nothing worth while to say. Despite all the ideas concerning right
which had troubled her vaguely since she had last seen him, she was now
influenced again strongly in his favour.

"I came out here to-day," he went on, solemnly, "to tell you just how I
feel--to see if you wouldn't listen to me."

Hurstwood was something of a romanticist after his kind. He was capable
of strong feelings--often poetic ones--and under a stress of desire,
such as the present, he waxed eloquent. That is, his feelings and his
voice were coloured with that seeming repression and pathos which is the
essence of eloquence.

"You know," he said, putting his hand on her arm, and keeping a strange
silence while he formulated words, "that I love you?" Carrie did not
stir at the words. She was bound up completely in the man's atmosphere.
He would have churchlike silence in order to express his feelings, and
she kept it. She did not move her eyes from the flat, open scene before
her. Hurstwood waited for a few moments, and then repeated the words.

"You must not say that," she said, weakly.

Her words were not convincing at all. They were the result of a feeble
thought that something ought to be said. He paid no attention to them
whatever.

"Carrie," he said, using her first name with sympathetic familiarity, "I
want you to love me. You don't know how much I need some one to waste a
little affection on me. I am practically alone. There is nothing in my
life that is pleasant or delightful. It's all work and worry with people
who are nothing to me."

As he said this, Hurstwood really imagined that his state was
pitiful. He had the ability to get off at a distance and view himself
objectively--of seeing what he wanted to see in the things which made up
his existence. Now, as he spoke, his voice trembled with that peculiar
vibration which is the result of tensity. It went ringing home to his
companion's heart.

"Why, I should think," she said, turning upon him large eyes which were
full of sympathy and feeling, "that you would be very happy. You know so
much of the world."

"That is it," he said, his voice dropping to a soft minor, "I know too
much of the world."

It was an important thing to her to hear one so well-positioned and
powerful speaking in this manner. She cou