ought she, watching the train disappear round the curve.
"I'll write it."

But she did not. When the time came to write, that idea somehow would not
fit in with the other things she was setting down. "I think I do care for
him--as a friend," she decided. "If he had only compelled me to find out
the state of my own mind! What a strange man! I don't see how he can love
me, for he knows me as I am. Perhaps he really doesn't; sometimes I think
he couldn't care for a woman as a woman wants to be cared for." Then as
his face as she had last seen it rose before her, and her lips once more
tingled, "Oh, yes, he _does_ care! And without his love how wretched I'd
be! What a greedy I am--wanting his love and taking it, and giving
nothing in return." That last more than half-sincere, though she, like
not a few of her sisters in the "Woman's Paradise," otherwise known as
the United States of America, had been spoiled into greatly exaggerating
the value of her graciously condescending to let herself be loved.

And she was lonely without him. If he could have come back at the end of
a week or a month, he would have been received with an ardor that would
have melted every real obstacle between them. Also, it would have
dissipated the far more obstructive imaginary obstacles from their
infection with the latter-day vice of psychologizing about matters which
lie in the realm of physiology, not of psychology. But he did not come;
and absence, like bereavement, has its climax, after which the thing
that was begins to be as if it had not been.

He was gone; and that impetuous parting caress of his had roused in her
an impulse that would never again sleep, would pace its cage restlessly,
eager for the chance to burst forth. And he had roused it when he would
not be there to make its imperious clamor personal to himself.

As Estelle was at her shop all day, and not a few of the evenings, Del
began to see much of Henrietta Hastings. Grandfather Fuller was now dead
and forgotten in the mausoleum into which he had put one-fifth of his
fortune, to the great discontent of the heirs. Henrietta's income had
expanded from four thousand a year to twenty; and she spent her days in
thinking of and talking of the careers to which she could help her
husband if he would only shake off the lethargy which seized him the year
after his marriage to a Fuller heiress. But Hastings would not; he was
happy in his books and in his local repute for knowing everyth