I cared for you. Well, I still
care for you, and so I can only go away somewhere--some place 'way
off--where--where---- See?"

"New York is a very large place," she observed.

"Yes, New York is a very large---- How good of you to remind me! But
then you don't understand. You can't understand. I know I can find no
place where I will cease to remember you, but then I can find some place
where I can cease to remember in a way that I am myself. I shall never
try to forget you. Those two violets, you know--one I found near the
tennis court and the other you gave me, you remember--I shall take them
with me."

"Here," said the girl, tugging at her gown for a moment--"Here! Here's a
third one." She thrust a violet toward him.

"If you were not so serenely insolent," said Hawker, "I would think that
you felt sorry for me. I don't wish you to feel sorry for me. And I
don't wish to be melodramatic. I know it is all commonplace enough, and
I didn't mean to act like a tenor. Please don't pity me."

"I don't," she replied. She gave the violet a little fling.

Hawker lifted his head suddenly and glowered at her. "No, you don't," he
at last said slowly, "you don't. Moreover, there is no reason why you
should take the trouble. But----"

He paused when the girl leaned and peered over the arm of her chair
precisely in the manner of a child at the brink of a fountain. "There's
my violet on the floor," she said. "You treated it quite
contemptuously, didn't you?"

"Yes."

Together they stared at the violet. Finally he stooped and took it in
his fingers. "I feel as if this third one was pelted at me, but I shall
keep it. You are rather a cruel person, but, Heaven guard us! that only
fastens a man's love the more upon a woman."

She laughed. "That is not a very good thing to tell a woman."

"No," he said gravely, "it is not, but then I fancy that somebody may
have told you previously."

She stared at him, and then said, "I think you are revenged for my
serene insolence."

"Great heavens, what an armour!" he cried. "I suppose, after all, I did
feel a trifle like a tenor when I first came here, but you have chilled
it all out of me. Let's talk upon indifferent topics." But he started
abruptly to his feet. "No," he said, "let us not talk upon indifferent
topics. I am not brave, I assure you, and it--it might be too much for
me." He held out his hand. "Good-bye."

"You are going?"

"Yes, I am going. Really I didn't think how it