was also an idealist, and
these artist folk now seemed to her the highest types she had ever known
or was likely to know. She felt the mystery and the power in Humiston's
personality, and his bitter and rebellious, almost blasphemous, words
were counterpoised by his paintings, which she acknowledged to be
beautiful--too beautiful for her to comprehend. He looked like a man of
sorrow and weary of battle, and she longed to know more about him. When
he was not fierce he was melancholy; evidently his life had been a
failure. "Why shouldn't I buy some of his pictures?" she asked herself.

Hitherto the answer to any such question had been, "Can we afford it?"
but now another and deeper query came in answer, like an echo: "Is it
right to spend Mart Haney's money? I am only his trained nurse, not his
wife," and she now knew that she could not be his wife. She shrank from
the weight of his hand, and each day made clearer the wide spaces of
years, of family, of ideals, which lay between them. The kiss Ben
Fordyce had pressed upon her lips had brought this revelation. But of
this she was not yet aware; she was only conscious of a growing dread of
the future. Her duties as his nurse were lightening. Lucius, indeed, now
took many of her tasks upon himself, and she no longer helped him with
his shoes or coat, and, what was still more significant, she could not
calmly think of going back to these wifely services.

She dwelt treacherously on Haney's own admission: that she had been in a
sense entrapped. He had believed himself a dying man at the time, and
she had been too excited, too exalted by the lurid romance of the scene
to be clear about anything save the wish and the will to save him; and
now she knew that at bottom of all her willingness to serve him lay the
consciousness that he was on his death-bed. Afterwards he had been to
her only a big-hearted, generous friend, in need of love and
companionship. This understanding had made it easy for her to prepare
his meals, to help him, as a nurse would help him, to dress and undress.
She had lost all of the fear and much of the admiration in which she
used to greet him as he swung into the office of her little hotel. He
had become to her an invalid, a child to be jollied and humored, and yet
respected; for no one could have been kinder or more scrupulously just
than he. And it was the recollection of all his acts of self-sacrifice
and loving patience which gave her assurance that he w