had oppressed me a few hours before, watched her closely, gathering
handfuls of sand and spilling them over my knee.

"Did you ever go to Broadway?" she began again.

"I have, yes."

"I did, too," she assured me eagerly. "I think it is beautiful. I
should like to live there, should not you? Perhaps," hopefully, "you
do live there?"

"No," I said, still on my guard and uncomfortable, "I don't. Are you
planning to live there after you are married?" She shook her head
regretfully.

"I am afraid not," she said, and her voice dropped a full third and
coloured with a most absurd and exquisite sombre quality, as Duse's
used to in _La Dame aux Camellias_. "Roger would not want to. He will
not want me to walk there very much, either. And that is very strange,
because there is where I first saw him. But there are places I shall
like quite as well, he says, and he will take me there. Will you come,
too?"

"I am afraid," I replied drily, "that I might be a little _de trop_,
perhaps. Roger might not care for my society under those
circumstances."

Again she answered my tone rather than my words.

"Roger loves you," she said simply.

"He used to," I returned--inexcusably. Oh, yes! utterly inexcusably.

Again her eyes widened and grew dark, and this time the corners of her
mouth curved down pitifully, and I felt a strange heaviness at my
heart.

"You do not love me, do you, Jerry?" she said, and now her voice
dropped a good fifth and thrilled like the plucked string of a
violoncello, and my nerves vibrated to it and tingled in my wrists.

"Roger said you would, and I thought you would--and you do not," she
said sadly.

I clenched a handful of the moist sand and leaned toward her, my heart
pounding furiously.

"Are you sorry?" I muttered unsteadily, fixing my eyes on hers.

She met them fully. Like great grey pools they were, her eyes, honest
as mountain springs, clear as rain. They caught me and held me and
drenched me in their innocent, warm sweetness; there was not one
thought in her head, not one corner in her heart that I was not free
to know. Those eyes had never held a secret since they opened into a
world that had never, to her knowledge, deceived her. They swam in
light, and oh, the depths on depths of love that one could sound
there! My last hateful anchor broke clean off and my heart slipped
from the stupid rocks of suspicion and self-protection and jealousy,
and floated away on the bosom of that sweet,