as not
unbecoming in her for the simple reason that it destroyed none of her
graciousness as regards other human relations besides that of love. That
men should seek her in matrimony from a selfish motive was as much to be
expected as that flies should seek the sugar bowl. She accepted the
fact as one of nature's laws, annoying enough but inevitable; a thing to
guard against, but not one of sufficient moment to grieve over.

With Thorpe, however, her suspicions had been lulled. There is something
virile and genuine about the woods and the men who inhabit them that
strongly predisposes the mind to accept as proved in their entirety all
the other virtues. Hilda had fallen into this state of mind. She endowed
each of the men whom she encountered with all the robust qualities
she had no difficulty in recognizing as part of nature's charm in the
wilderness. Now at a word her eyes were opened to what she had done. She
saw that she had assumed unquestioningly that her lover possessed the
qualities of his environment.

Not for a moment did she doubt the reality of her love. She had
conceived one of those deep, uplifting passions possible only to a young
girl. But her cynical experience warned her that the reality of that
passion's object was not proven by any test besides the fallible one
of her own poetizing imagination. The reality of the ideal she had
constructed might be a vanishable quantity even though the love of it
was not. So to the interview that ensued she brought, not the partiality
of a loving heart, nor even the impartiality of one sitting in judgment,
but rather the perverted prejudice of one who actually fears the truth.

"Will you tell me for what you want the money?" she asked.

The young man caught the note of distrust. At once, instinctively, his
own confidence vanished. He drew within himself, again beyond the power
of justifying himself with the needed word.

"The firm needs it in the business," said he.

Her next question countered instantaneously.

"Does the firm need the money more than you do me?"

They stared at each other in the silence of the situation that had so
suddenly developed. It had come into being without their volition, as a
dust cloud springs up on a plain.

"You do not mean that, Hilda," said Thorpe quietly. "It hardly comes to
that."

"Indeed it does," she replied, every nerve of her fine organization
strung to excitement. "I should be more to you than any firm."

"Sometime