s hard to go. My heart
begins to ache already with prospective hunger. You have been my world,
my one ambition for three months--my incessant care and thought."

"All the more reason why you should forget me and things dramatic for a
while. There is nothing so destructive to peace and tranquillity as the
stage."

"Don't I know that? When I was a youth in a Western village I became in
some way the possessor of two small photographs of Elsie Melville. She
was my ideal till I saw her, fifteen years later."

Helen laughed. "Poor Elsie, she took on flesh dreadfully in her later
years."

"Nevertheless, those photographs started me on the road to the stage. I
used to fancy myself as Macbeth, but I soon got switched into the belief
that I could write plays. Now that I have demonstrated that"--his tone
was a little bitter again--"I think I would better return to
architecture."

She silenced him. "All that we will discuss when you come back
reinvigorated from the mountains." She turned to her desk. "I have
something here for you. Here is a small check from Westervelt on
account. Don't hesitate to take it. He was glad to give it."

"It is the price of my intellectual honesty."

"By no means!" She laughed, but her heart sickened with a sense of the
truth of his phrase. "It's only a very small part payment. You can at
least know that the bribe they offer is large."

"Yes"--he looked at her meaningly--"the prize was too great for my poor
resolution. All they can give will remain _part_ payment. I wonder if
you will be compassionate enough to complete the purchase--"

"_That_, too, is in the future," she answered, still struggling to be
gayly reassuring, though she knew, perfectly well, that she was face to
face with a most momentous decision and that an insistent, determined
lover was about to be restored to confidence and pride. "And now,
good-bye." And she gave him her hand in positive dismissal.

He took the hand and pressed it hard, then turned and went away without
speaking.

* * * * *

There was a hint of spring in the air the afternoon of his leaving. The
wind came from the southwest, brisk and powerful. In the pale, misty
blue of the sky a fleet of small, white clouds swam, like ships with
wide and bellying sails, low down in the eastern horizon, and the sight
of them somehow made it harder for Douglass to leave the city of his
adoption. He was powerfully minded to turn back, to r