nlaid writing desk, were filled now with
branching clusters of American Beauty roses. Beyond them, and beyond the
amber satin curtains at the long window, I saw the elm boughs arching
against a pale gold sunset into which a single swallow was flying. And I
remember that swallow as I remember the look, swift, expectant, as if
it, also, were flying, that trembled, for an instant, on Sally's face.

"It is George," she said, turning to me with radiant eyes; "George has
done this. These are the things he bought, and I wondered so what he
would do with them." Then before something in my face, the radiance died
out of her eyes. "Would you rather he didn't do it? Would you rather I
shouldn't keep them?" she asked.

A struggle began within me. Through the window I could see still the
pale gold sunset beyond the elms, but the swallow was gone, and gone,
also, from Sally's face was the look as of one flying.

"Would you rather that I shouldn't keep them?" she asked again, and her
voice was very gentle.

At that gentleness the struggle ceased as sharply as it had begun.

"Do as you choose, darling, you know far better than I," I replied; and
bending over her, I raised her chin that was lowered, and kissed her
lips.

A light, a bloom, something that was fragrant and soft as the colour and
scent of the American Beauty roses, broke over her as she looked up at
me with her mouth still opening under my kiss.

"Then I'll keep them," she answered, "because it would hurt him so, Ben,
if I sent them back."

The colour and bloom were still there, but in my heart a chill had
entered to drive out the warmth. My ruin, my failure, the poverty to
which I had brought Sally and the child through my inordinate ambition,
and the weight of the two hundred thousand dollars of debt on my
shoulders--all these things returned to my memory, with an additional
heaviness, like a burden that has been lifted only to drop back more
crushingly. And as always in my thoughts now, this sense of my failure
came to me in the image of George Bolingbroke, with his air of generous
self-sufficiency, as if he needed nothing because he had been born to
the possession of all necessary things.

Sally drew the long pins from her hat, laid them, with the floating
white veil and her coat, on a chair in one corner, and began to move
softly about in her restful, capable way. Her very presence, I had once
said of her, would make a home, and I remembered this a little lat