laimed. "All the same, I feel just as you do. Out there, for all
your graciousness, you were something sacred, something far away."

"And here?" she whispered.

"Shall I tell you?" he asked, with a sudden fire in his eyes.

"For heaven's sake, no!" she begged, thrusting out her hands. "I'm afraid
to think--afraid of actual thoughts. Don't let us give form to anything.
Let me be content to just feel this new warmth in my life."

She leaned back in her chair with a contented sigh. A little tug came
snorting up the river. Even the roar of the traffic over Waterloo Bridge
seemed muffled and disintegrated by the breeze which swept on its way
through the rustling lime trees.

"You are wonderfully situated here," she went on. "I don't believe it
is London at all. It rests me more than any place I have been in for
a long time, and yet--at the same time--I think that it is going to
make me sad."

"Sad? But why?" he asked anxiously.

"Because it seems like one of the stopping places--where one steps off
to think, you know. I don't want to think. I have had nine such miserable
years. All through the war there was one's work, one's hospital, the
excitement of the gigantic struggle. And now everything seems flat. One
struggles on without incentive. One lives without hope."

"We weren't meant to do that," he protested.

"Only those of us who have thrown our lives away," she went on wearily.
"You see, I thought Henry was different. I thought he only wanted a
little understanding, a little kindness. I made a mistake."

"Life is too wonderful a thing," he insisted, "to lose the glory of it
for one mistake."

"I am on the rocks," she sighed, "now and always. If I were made like
your little luncheon friend, it might be different. I suppose I should
spread my wings and settle down upon another planet. But I can't. I am
differently made. I am not proud of it. I wish I weren't. It wouldn't all
seem so hard then, I am still young, you know, really," she added, with a
note of rebellion in her tone.

"How young?"

"Thirty-one."

"Nowadays, that is youth," he declared confidently, "and youth
means hope."

"Sometimes," she admitted a little listlessly, "I have dared to feel
hope. I have felt it more than ever since you came. I don't know why, but
there it is."

He turned his head and looked at her, appraisingly yet with reverence. No
measure of despair could alter the fact that she was a very beautiful
woman. Her slimness nev