ant to be heard and with
occasional laughter so different.

They moved on, seeking greater privacy. Marguerite's lamps were
burnt out--brief flames as measured by human passion. But overhead
burnt the million torches of the stars. How brief all human
passion measured by that long, long light!

He stopped at last:

"Here?"

She placed herself as far as possible from him.

The seat was at the terminus of a path in the wildest part of
Marguerite's garden. Overhead against the trunk of a tree a
solitary lantern was flickering fitfully. It soon went out. The
dazzling lights of the ballroom, glimmering through boughs and
vines, shot a few rays into their faces. Music, languorous,
torturing the heart, swelled and died on the air, mingled with the
murmurings of eager voices. Close around them in the darkness was
the heavy fragrance of perishing blossoms--earth dials of
yesterday; close around them the clean sweetness of fresh
ones--breath of the coming morn. It was an hour when the heart,
surrounded by what can live no more and by what never before has
lived, grows faint and sick with yearnings for its own past and
forlorn with the inevitableness of change--the cruelty of all
change.

For a while silence lasted. He waited for her to speak; she tried
repeatedly to do so. At length with apparent fear that he might
misunderstand, she interposed an agitated command:

"Do not say anything."

A few minutes later she began to speak to him, still struggling for
her self-control.

"I do not forget that to-night I have been acting a part, and that
I have asked you to act a part with me. I have walked with you and
I have talked with you, and I am with you now to create an
impression that is false; to pretend before those who see us that
nothing is changed. I do not forget that I have been doing this
thing which is unworthy of me. But it is the first time--try not
to believe it to be my character. I am compelled to tell you that
it is one of the humiliations you have forced upon me."

"I have understood this," he said hastily, breaking the silence she
had imposed upon him.

"Then let it pass," she cried nervously. "It is enough that I have
been obliged to observe my own hypocrisies, and that I have asked
you to countenance and to conceal them."

He offered no response. And in a little while she went on:

"I ought to tell you one thing more. Last week I made all my
arrangements to go away at once, for t