d her hand against her heart, which was hammering.

He saw the motion, and took her hand in his. She glanced about wildly.
She was in a whirl of terror of everything under heaven. Too dignified
to wrest herself away and run, she gave him a swift glance of appeal,
then bent her head. He dropped her hand.

"I would not frighten nor bother you for the world, but you know what I
have wanted to say for days past. That, at least, can be no shock: you
have known for a long while."

"I'd rather you didn't say it," she gasped.

"I intend to say it, nevertheless, and you will soon get used to it.
Will you marry me?"

"Oh--I--suppose so--that is, if you want me to. Let us go back to the
house."

"I have no intention of going back to the house for fully half an hour.
Do you love me?"

She hated him at the moment.

"Answer me."

"I--I--thought I did--I don't know."

"Well, we will drop the subject for a moment. There are some other
things I want to talk to you about. Shall we walk on?"

She drew a long breath at the respite. He resumed in a moment.

"Of course I am double your age, but I do not think we shall be any less
happy on that account. My life, I am going to tell you, has not been an
ideal one. After the wildness of youth came the deliberate
transgressions of maturity, then the more flagrant, because purposeless
sins which followed satiety. I know nothing of the middle classes of the
United States,--I have lived little in this country,--but the young men
of the upper class are not educated to add to the glory of the American
race: they are educated to spend their fathers' millions. It is true
that in spite of a rather wild career at college I left it with a
half-defined idea of being a scientific explorer, and had taken a
special course to that end. But my ambitions crumbled somewhere between
the campus and New York. I am not seeking to exculpate myself, to throw
the responsibility on my adolescent country: I had something more than
the average intelligence, and I pursued my subsequent life deliberately.
Not pursuing an ideal, I had no care to reserve the best that was in me
for the woman who should one day be my wife. I entered diplomacy because
I liked the life, and because I believed that the day would come when
women would mean little more than paper dolls to me, and power would
mean everything. I did not reckon on wearying to desperation of the
world in general. That time came; with it a desire to live an