yet remain within the orbit of my
understanding?" she asked, with a faint smile. "If so, I should like to
know exactly how you feel about it all."

He passed a course with a somewhat weary gesture of refusal, and leaned
back in his chair.

"You are comprehensive--as usual," he remarked. "Just then I was
wondering whether the perfume of these banks of hot-house flowers--I
don't know what they are--was as sweet as the odour of the salt from
the creeks, or my roses when the night wind touched them."

"You were wondering! And what have you decided?"

"Ah, I must not say. In any case you would not agree with me. Wasn't it
you who once scoffed at my idyll in the wilderness?"

"I do not think that I believe in idylls, nowadays," she answered. "One
risks so many disappointments when one believes in anything."

He raised his eyebrows.

"You did not talk like this at Blakely," he remarked.

"I am nearly a year older," she answered, "and a year wiser."

"You pain me," he answered, with a little sigh. "You are a person of
intelligence, and you talk of growing wiser with the years. Don't you
know that the only supreme wisdom is the wisdom of the child? Our
inherent ignorance is fed and nourished by experience."

"You are hiding yourself," she remarked, "behind a fence of words--words
that mean less than nothing! I don't suppose that even you would hesitate
to admit that you have come into a larger world. You may have to pay for
it. We all do. But at any rate it is an atmosphere which breeds men."

"And changes women," he murmured, under his breath.

She did not speak to him for several moments. Then the alteration in her
tone and manner was almost marked.

"You mentioned Blakely a few minutes ago," she said. "I wonder whether
you remember our discussion there upon precisely what has come to pass."

"Perfectly!"

"I remember that in those days," she continued, reflectively, "you were
very firm indeed, or was it my poor arguments that were at fault? Your
vegetable and sentimental existence was a part of yourself. Ambition! You
had forgotten what it was. Duty! You spouted individualism by the hour.
Gratify my curiosity, won't you? Tell me what made you change your mind?"

Mannering was silent for a moment. A close observer might have noticed
a certain alteration in his face. A touch of the coming weariness was
already there.

"I have never changed my mind," he answered, quietly. "My inclinations
to-day are what they