and they shook hands. "Do you like me better--or
less?"

"Better," was her prompt, apparently honest reply.

"Curiously enough, I'm beginning to _like_ you," said he. "Now don't ask
me what I mean by that. If you don't know already, you'll not find out
from me."

"Oh, but I do know," cried she. "The way you kissed me--that was one
thing. The way you feel toward me now--that's a different thing. Isn't
it so?"

"Exactly. I see we are going to get on."

"Yes, indeed."

They shook hands again in friendliest fashion, and she opened the front
door for him. And her farewell smile was bright and happy.

VII

In the cold clear open he proceeded to take the usual account of
stock--with dismal results. She had wound him round her fingers, had
made him say only the things he should not have said, and leave unsaid
the things that might have furthered his purposes. He had conducted the
affair ridiculously--"just what is to be expected of an infatuated
fool." However, there was no consolation in the discovery that he was
reduced, after all these years of experience, to the common level--man
weak and credulous in his dealings with woman. He hoped that his disgust
with himself would lead on to disgust, or, rather, distaste for her. It
is the primal instinct of vanity to dislike and to shun those who have
witnessed its humiliation.

"I believe I am coming to my senses," he said. And he ventured to call
her up before him for examination and criticism. This as he stood upon
the forward deck of the ferry with the magnificent panorama of New York
before him. New York! And he, of its strong men, of the few in all that
multitude who had rank and power--he who had won as his promised wife
the daughter of one of the dozen mighty ones of the nation! What an
ill-timed, what an absurd, what a crazy step down this excursion of
his! And for what? There he summoned her before him. And at the first
glance of his fancy at her fair sweet face and lovely figure, he
quailed. He was hearing her voice again. He was feeling the yield of her
smooth, round form to his embrace, the yield of her smooth white cheek
to his caress. In his nostrils was the fragrance of her youth, the
matchless perfume of nature, beyond any of the distillations of art in
its appeal to his normal and healthy nerves. And he burned with the fire
only she could quench. "I must--I must.--My God, I _must_!" he muttered.

When he reached home, he asked whether his sister