-and perhaps more of pity than of either."

Rita said: "I cannot feel as charitably.... _You_ still have that
right."

"Rita! Rita!" she said softly, "we both have loved men, you with the
ignorance and courage of a child--I with less ignorance and with my
courage as yet untested. Where is the difference between us--if we love
sincerely?"

Rita leaned forward and looked at her searchingly:

"Do you mean to do--what you said you would?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because he wants me."

Rita sprang to her feet and began pacing the floor.

"I will not have it so!" she said excitedly, "I will not have it so! If
he is a man--a real man--he will not have it so, either. If he will, he
does not love you; mark what I say, Valerie--he does not love you
enough. No man can love a woman enough to accept that from her; it would
be a paradox, I tell you!"

"He loves me enough," said Valerie, very pale. "He could not love me as
I care for him; it is not in a man to do it, nor in any human being to
love as I love him. You don't understand, Rita. I _must_ be a part of
him--not very much, because already there is so much to him--and I am
so--so unimportant."

"You are more important than he is," said Rita fiercely--"with all your
fineness and loyalty and divine sympathy and splendid humility--with
your purity and your loveliness; and in spite of his very lofty
intellect and his rather amazing genius, and his inherited social
respectability--_you_ are the more important to the happiness and
welfare of this world--even to the humblest corner in it!"

"Rita! Rita! What wild, partisan nonsense you are talking!"

[Illustration: "His thoughts were mostly centred on Valerie."]

"Oh, Valerie, Valerie, if you only knew! If you only knew!"

* * * * *

Querida called next day. Rita was at home but flatly refused to see him.

"Tell Mr. Querida," she said to the janitor, "that neither I nor Miss
West are at home to him, and that if he is as nimble at riddles as he is
at mischief he can guess this one before his friend Mr. Cardemon
returns from a voyage around the world."

Which reply slightly disturbed Querida.

All during dinner--and he was dining alone--he considered it; and his
thoughts were mostly centred on Valerie.

Somehow, some way or other he must come to an understanding with Valerie
West. Somehow, some way, she must be brought to listen to him. Because,
while he lived, married or single, poor o