ppealing wistfully.

"It seems a pity to separate them," he said. "They'd look well
together over an open fireplace."

The girl frowned unhappily. "I don't know," she protested. "I don't
know."

The next day Lee received from the War Department a telegram directing
him to "proceed without delay" to San Francisco, and there to embark
for the Philippines.

That night he put the question to her directly, but again she shook her
head unhappily; again she said: "I don't know!"

So he sailed without her, and each evening at sunset, as the great
transport heaved her way across the swell of the Pacific, he stood at
the rail and looked back. With the aid of the first officer he
calculated the difference in time between a whaling village situated at
forty-four degrees north and an army transport dropping rapidly toward
the equator, and so, each day, kept in step with the girl he loved.

"Now," he would tell himself, "she is in her cart in front of the
post-office, and while they sort the morning mail she gossips with the
fisher folks, the summer folks, the grooms, and chauffeurs. Now she is
sitting for her portrait to Stedman" (he did not dwell long on that
part of her day), "and now she is at tennis, or, as she promised,
riding alone at sunset down our lost road through the woods."

But that part of her day from which Lee hurried was that part over
which the girl herself lingered. As he turned his eyes from his canvas
to meet hers, Stedman, the charming, the deferential, the adroit, who
never allowed his painting to interrupt his talk, told her of what he
was pleased to call his dreams and ambitions, of the great and
beautiful ladies who had sat before his easel, and of the only one of
them who had given him inspiration. Especially of the only one who had
given him inspiration. With her always to uplift him, he could become
one of the world's most famous artists, and she would go down into
history as the beautiful woman who had helped him, as the wife of
Rembrandt had inspired Rembrandt, as "Mona Lisa" had made Leonardo.

Gilbert wrote: "It is not the lover who comes to woo, but the lover's
way of wooing!" His successful lover was the one who threw the girl
across his saddle and rode away with her. But one kind of woman does
not like to have her lover approach shouting: "At the gallop! Charge!"

She prefers a man not because he is masterful, but because he is not.
She likes to believe the man needs her more tha