o it--here beside her. Life! life! warm, kind life!

In the park he led her into a deserted path. A bench stood beneath a
tall, leafless tree, its branches stencilled flatly on the yellow-gray
fog. Haldicott and Allida sat down side by side.

"Now tell me. You can trust me utterly. Tell me everything," said
Haldicott.

His fine face, all competence and mastery, studied hers, its shattered
loveliness. She leaned her head back against the bench. Life was there,
and a great peace seemed to flow through her as the mere consciousness
of its presence filled her. As long as he held her hand she could not be
frightened; and since she was only a ghost, since all her past seemed to
have dropped from her, she could look at it with him, she could tell him
what he asked. As if exhausted, borne along by his will, she said, "I am
going to commit suicide."

Haldicott made no ejaculation and no movement. Her eyes were closed, and
he studied her face. Its innocent charm almost made him smile at her
words; and yet the expression he had seen from across the street, as she
dropped that letter into the box and stood frozen, had gone too well
with such words. He reflected silently. He had long known Allida Fraser,
never more than slightly; and yet from the frequency of slight knowledge
he found that he had accumulated, quite unconsciously, an impression of
her, distinct, sweet, appealing. He saw her, silent and gentle, in her
tawdry mother's tawdry house; he heard her grave quiet voice. He had
thought her, not knowing that he thought at all, charming. He had always
been glad to talk to her, to make her gravity, the little air of chill
composure that he had so understood, and liked, in the daughter of a
desperate, faded flirt, warm into confident interest and smiles.
Thinking of that quiet voice, that gentle smile, the poise and dignity
of all the little personality, he could not connect them with hysterical
shallowness. But he had, he now recognized, thought of her as older,
more tempered to reality. There was a revelation of desperate youth, and
youth's sense of the finality of desperation, on her face; and, with all
the rigid resolve he had seen, he could guess in it youth's essential
fluidity. She was resolved, and yet all resolves in a soul so young were
only moods, unless circumstances let them stand still, stagnate, and
finally freeze. She was not frozen yet. It was only a mood standing
still; shake it, and it would fluctuate into su