st resign. Unmarried, he would
be as irresponsible this coming winter as he was last, and if she
remained would be thrown back upon her. She could not allow that--she
could not endure it.

She had lost so many things all at once. She did not realize until now
how much dreaming she had done in these last few months. Dreams of
which at the time she had scarcely been conscious returned to-night to
mock her with startling vividness. It was not so much that she wished
to be loved as that she wished to love. That was where she had
deceived herself. Had Don made love to her, she would have recognized
the situation and guarded herself. But this matter of loving him was
an attack from a quarter she had not anticipated.

In the next three weeks she left him little chance to think of
anything but of his work and of Frances. She talked of nothing else at
lunch; she talked of nothing else on Saturday afternoons and on
Sundays and whenever they met on other days. This had its effect. It
accustomed him to associate together the two chief objectives in his
life until in his thoughts they became synonymous. For the first time
since their engagement, he began to think of Frances as an essential
feature of his everyday affairs.

He began to think about what changes in the house would be necessary
before she came. He talked this over with Miss Winthrop.

"I wish you could come up and look the place over before Frances gets
here," he said to her one day.

If the color left her face for a second, it came back the next with
plenty to spare. The idea was preposterous, and yet it appealed to her
strangely.

"I wish I could," she answered sincerely.

"Well, why can't you?" he asked.

"It's impossible--of course," she said.

"I could arrange a little dinner and ask some one to chaperon," he
suggested.

"It's out of the question," she answered firmly. "You can tell me all
about it."

"But telling you about it isn't like letting you see it," he said.

"It is almost as good, and--almost as good is something, isn't it?"

There was a suppressed note in her voice that made him look up. He had
caught many such notes of late. Sometimes, as now, he half expected to
find her eyes moist when he looked up. He never did; he always found
her smiling.

"I'd have Nora give everything a thorough cleaning before September,"
she advised.

"I'll do that," he nodded.

He wrote it down in his notebook, and that night spoke to Nora about
it. She