. Montgomery's dim parlor;
he noted, as in a dream, that his hat had fallen and was rolling half
the length of it.

"Oh, wait!" cried the girl. "What are you doing---- You don't know.
There is something I must tell you--that will make you hate me----" She
struggled to begin somehow, but she did not know where.

"No," he said. "You needn't tell me anything. There isn't anything in
the world that could change me to you--nothing that you could tell me!
Sometime, if you must--if you wish; but not now. I've been too
miserable, and now I'm so happy."

"But it's very foolish, it's silly! I tell you----"

"Not now, not now!" He insisted. He made her cry, he made her laugh;
but he would not listen to her. She knew it was all wrong, that it was
romantic and fantastic, and she was afraid of it; but she was so happy
too, that she could not will it for the moment to be otherwise. She put
off the time that must come, or let him put it off for her, and gladly
lost herself in the bliss of the present. The fear, growing more and
more vague and formless, haunted her rapture, but even this ceased
before they parted, and left her at perfect peace in his love--their
love.

He told her how much she could be to him, how she could supplement him
in every way where he was faltering and deficient, and he poured out
his heart in praises of her that made her brain reel. They talked of a
thousand things, touching them, and leaving them, and coming back, but
always keeping within the circle of their relation to themselves. They
flattered one another with the tireless and credulous egotism of love;
they tried to tell what they had thought of each other from the first
moment they met, and tried to make out that they neither had ever since
had a thought that was not the other's; they believed this. The
commonplaces of the passion ever since it began to refine itself from
the earliest savage impulse, seemed to have occurred to them for the
first time in the history of the race; they accused themselves each of
not being worthy of the other; they desired to be very good, and to
live for the highest things.

They began this life by spending the whole afternoon together. When
some other people came into the parlor, they went out to walk. They
walked so long and far, that they came at last to the Park without
meaning to, and sat on a bench by a rock. Other people were doing the
same: nurses with baby-carriages before them; men smoking and reading;
el