to her for having once loved him, for a little while.

"As for 'the other man,' he proved somewhat of an enigma to the gossips.
He attempted no secrecy; if anything, he rather paraded his
subjugation--or his conquest, it was difficult to decide which term to
apply. He rode and drove with her; visited her in public and in private
(in such privacy as can be hoped for in a house filled with chattering
servants, and watched by spying eyes); loaded her with expensive
presents, which she wore openly, and papered his smoking-den with her
photographs. Yet he never allowed himself to appear in the least degree
ridiculous; never allowed her to come between him and his work. A letter
from her, he would lay aside unopened until he had finished what he
evidently regarded as more important business. When boudoir and engine-
shed became rivals, it was the boudoir that had to wait.

"The woman chafed under his self-control, which stung her like a lash,
but clung to him the more abjectly.

"'Tell me you love me!' she would cry fiercely, stretching her white arms
towards him.

"'I have told you so,' he would reply calmly, without moving.

"'I want to hear you tell it me again,' she would plead with a voice that
trembled on a sob. 'Come close to me and tell it me again, again,
again!'

"Then, as she lay with half-closed eyes, he would pour forth a flood of
passionate words sufficient to satisfy even her thirsty ears, and
afterwards, as the gates clanged behind him, would take up an engineering
problem at the exact point at which half an hour before, on her entrance
into the room, he had temporarily dismissed it.

"One day, a privileged friend put bluntly to him this question: 'Are you
playing for love or vanity?'

"To which the man, after long pondering, gave this reply: ''Pon my soul,
Jack, I couldn't tell you.'

"Now, when a man is in love with a woman who cannot make up her mind
whether she loves him or not, we call the complication comedy; where it
is the woman who is in earnest the result is generally tragedy.

"They continued to meet and to make love. They talked--as people in
their position are prone to talk--of the beautiful life they would lead
if it only were not for the thing that was; of the earthly paradise--or,
maybe, 'earthy' would be the more suitable adjective--they would each
create for the other, if only they had the right which they hadn't.

"In this work of imagination the man trusted chiefly to his