irs and
bursting buds; the roads were running water, and every bank and meadow
oozed the thawing streams, but there was no green yet. Chris had come
for the girl at three o'clock, just as she was starting out for one of
her aimless, unhappy tramps, and had carried her off for a
twenty-five-mile run to the quiet corner of the tavern's porch in
Tarrytown where they were having tea. "I suppose that's just life.
Things go so rottenly, sometimes!"

Norma's eyes watered as she pushed the untasted toast away from her,
cupped her chin in her hands, and stared at the river in her turn.

"Chris, if I could go back, I think I'd never speak to you!" she said,
wretchedly.

"You mustn't say that," he reproached her. "My darling; surely it's
brought you some happiness?"

"I suppose so," Norma conceded, lifelessly, after a silence. "But I
can't go on!" she protested, suddenly. "I can't keep this up! I suppose
I've done something very wicked, to be punished this way. But, Chris, I
loved you from the very first day I ever saw you, in Biretta's
Bookstore, I think. I can't sleep," she stammered, piteously, "and I am
so afraid all the time!"

"Afraid of what?" the man asked, very low.

She faced him, honestly.

"You know what! Of you--of me. It can't go on. You know that. And
yet----" And Norma looked far away, her beautiful weary eyes burning in
her white face. "And yet, I can't stop it!" she whispered.

"Oh, Chris, don't let's fool ourselves!" she interrupted his protest
impatiently. "Weeks ago, _weeks_ ago!--we said that we would see each
other less, that it would taper off. We tried. It's no use! If we were
in different cities--in different families, even! I tell myself that it
will grow less and less," she added presently, as the man watched her in
silence, "but oh, my God!--how long the years ahead look!"

And Norma put her head down on the table, pressed her white fingers
suddenly against her eyes with a gesture infinitely desolate and
despairing, and he knew that she was in tears. Then there was a long
silence.

"Look here, Norma," said Chris, suddenly, in a quiet, reasonable tone.
"I am thirty-eight. I've had affairs several times in my life, two or
three before I married Alice, two or three since. They've never been
very serious, never gone very deep. When we were married I was
twenty-four. I know women like to pretend that I'm an awful killer when
I get going," he interrupted himself to say boyishly, "but there was