zed with a fit of coughing and had
to leave the room, and again when her mother was called to the telephone.
At such times she shrank away from him at first as though frightened by
the intensity of the emotion she had created, but she never resisted. To
him these brief and stolen embraces were almost intolerably sweet, like
insufficient sips of water to a man burned up with thirst.

She puzzled him as much as ever. When he was with her he felt as sure of
her love as of his own existence. And yet she often sought to elude him.
When he called up for engagements she objected and put him off. And she
surrounded herself with other men as much as ever, and flirted gracefully
with all of them, so that he was always feeling the sharp physical pangs
of jealousy. Sometimes he felt egotistically sure that she was merely
trying by these devices to provoke his desire the more, but at other times
he thought her voice over the phone sounded doubtful and afraid, and he
became wildly eager to get to her and make sure of her again.

Just as her kiss had crystallized his feeling for her into driving desire,
so it had focussed and intensified his discontent. Before he had been more
or less resigned to wait for his fortune and the power he meant to make of
it; now it seemed to him that unless he could achieve these things at
once, they would never mean anything to him. For money was the one thing
that would give him even a chance to win her. It was obviously useless to
ask her to marry him poor. He would have nothing to bring against the
certain opposition of her family. He could not run away with her. And
indeed he was altogether too poor to support a wife if he had one, least
of all a wife who had been carefully groomed and trained to capture a
fortune.

There was only one way. If he could go to her strong and rich, he felt
sure that he could persuade her to go away with him, for he knew that she
belonged to him when he was with her. He pictured himself going to her in
a great motor car. Such a car had always been in his imagination the
symbol of material strength. He felt sure he could destroy her doubts and
hesitations. He would carry her away and she would be all and irrevocably
his before any one could interfere or object.

This dream filled and tortured his imagination. Its realization would mean
not only fulfilment of his desire, but also revenge upon the Roths for the
humiliations they had made him feel. It pushed everything else