wait for your return--ask him, if you doubt my word."

"Good Heavens, Ella, what do you say? Doubt your word--I doubt your
word? You wound me deeply."

"Forgive me, my Phyllis. I don't quite know what I said. Ah, let me
nestle here--here." She had put her head down to Phyllis' bare neck
and was looking up to her face as a child might have done. "There is
no danger here. Now pet me, and say that you forgive me for having said
whatever I did say."

Phyllis laughed and put her lips down among the myriad diamonds that
glowed amid the other's hair, like stars seen among the thick foliage of
a copper beech.

"I forgive you for whatever you said," she cried. "I, too, have
forgotten what it was; but you must never say so again. But had you
really no engagement for to-night that you took that fancy for going to
'Romeo'?"

"No engagement? Had I no engagement, do you ask me?" cried Ella. "Oh,
yes, yes! I had an engagement, but I broke it--I broke it--I broke it,
and that is why I am here. Whatever may come of it, I am here, and here
I mean to stay. I am safe here. At home I am in danger."

Phyllis wondered greatly what had come to her friend to make her talk in
this wild strain.

"Where were you engaged?" she inquired casually. She had come to the
conclusion that there was safety in the commonplace: she would not
travel out of the region of commonplaces with Ella in her present state.

"Where was I engaged? Surely I told you. Didn't I say something about
the opera--'Romeo and Juliet'?--that was to be the place, but I came to
you instead. Ah, what have we missed! Was there ever such a poem written
as 'Romeo and Juliet'? Was there ever such music as Gounod's? I
thought the first time that I went to the opera that it would spoil
Shakspere--how could it do otherwise? I asked. Could supreme perfection
be improved upon? Before the balcony scene had come to an end I found
that I had never before understood the glory of the poem. Ah, if you
could understand what love means, my Phyllis, you would appreciate the
poem and the music; the note of doom runs through it; that--that is
wherein its greatness lies--passion and doom--passion and doom--that is
my own life--the life of us women. We live in a whirlwind of passion,
and fancy that we can step out of the whirlwind into a calm at any
moment. We marry our husbands and we fancy that all the tragedy of human
passion is over so far as we are concerned. 'The haven entered and the
tempe