m
something. They couldn't refuse to receive the mayor of the city.
She saw then that he was bent on remaining with Doyle until after the
election.

Lily sat back, listening and thinking. Sometimes she thought that he
did not love her at all. He always said he wanted her, but that was
different.

"I think you love yourself more than you love me, Louis," she said, when
he had exhausted himself. "I don't believe you know what love is."

That brought him to his knees, his arms around her, kissing her hands,
begging her not to give him up, and once again her curious sense of
responsibility for him triumphed.

"You will marry me soon, dear, won't you?" he implored her. But she
thought of Willy Cameron, oddly enough, even while his arms were around
her; of the difference in the two men. Louis, big, crouching, suppliant
and insistent; Willy Cameron, grave, reserved and steady, taking what
she now knew was the blow of her engagement like a gentleman and a
soldier.

They represented, although she did not know it, the two divisions of men
in love, the men who offer much and give little, the others who, out of
a deep humility, offer little and give everything they have.

In the end, nothing was settled. After he had gone Lily, went up to
Elinor's room. She had found in Elinor lately a sort of nervous tension
that puzzled her, and that tension almost snapped when Lily told her of
her visit home, and of her determination to marry Louis within the next
few days. Elinor had dropped her sewing and clenched her hands in her
lap.

"Not soon, Lily!" she said. "Oh, not soon. Wait a little--wait two
months."

"Two months?" Lily said wonderingly. "Why two months?"

"Because, at the end of two months, nothing would make you marry him,"
Elinor said, almost violently. "I have sat by and waited, because I
thought you would surely see your mistake. But now--Lily, do you envy me
my life?"

"No," Lily said truthfully; "but you love him."

Elinor sat, her eyes downcast and brooding.

"You are different," she said finally. "You will break, where I have
only bent."

But she said no more about a delay. She had been passive too long to be
able to take any strong initiative now. And all her moral and physical
courage she was saving for a great emergency.

Cardew Way was far from the center of town, and Lily knew nothing of the
bomb outrages of that night.

When she went down to breakfast the next morning she found Jim Doyle
pacing t