ver be
able to forget you.

"Until Saturday.
"M."

Clavering's immediate act was to dash off a love-letter more
impassioned than any he had ever dreamed himself capable of writing,
vowing that he was dazzled and fascinated, God knew, but that he loved
her with the love of his life and would marry her if she would have
him, no matter what her revelations. And with what patience he could
muster and with no grace whatever he would make no attempt to see her
until Saturday night. But she must believe that he loved her and she
must write at once and tell him so. He could not exist throughout that
interminable interval unless she wrote him at once that she believed in
the existence and the indissolubility of that bond, and that he had
given her the highest and deepest and most passionate love of which man
was capable, and which no woman but she could inspire, for no woman
like her had ever lived.

He dared not read it over. He had never let himself go before, and he
had written too much for print not to be self-conscious and critical of
even a love-letter intended only for concordant eyes. Nevertheless, he
was aware even in his excitement that the more reckless it was the
surer its effect. No edited love-letter ever yet hit its mark. (He
remembered Parnell's love-letters, however, and devoutly hoped his own
would never see the light.) The waiter entered at the moment, and he
gave him the missive, hastily addressed and sealed, and asked him to
tell the "desk" to send it immediately and give the boy orders to wait
for an answer.

He drank his coffee, but ate nothing. Nor did he open his newspapers.
He strode up and down his rooms or stood at the window watching the
hurrying throngs, the lumbering green busses, the thousand automobiles
and taxis over on Fifth Avenue. They were as unreal as a cinema. He
had the delusion, common to lovers, that Earth was inhabited by two
people only--that brief extension of the soul which in its common
acceptance of eternal loneliness looks out upon the world as upon a
projected vision in which no reality exists, for man the dreamer is but
a dream himself. Phantasmagoria!

He glanced at the clock every time he passed it. It seemed incredible
that mere minutes were passing. But she was merciful. She kept him in
suspense but thirty-five minutes. The messenger boy stared at the
celebrated journalist, with whose appearance he was reasonably
familiar, as if regarding a phase