s gray eyes. "I should be working
now, and I will have to make up the lost time when I go home." He
bowed gallantly. "The pleasure is double with me, you observe; I do
not think twice about paying a double price for it."

He spoke lightly, almost mockingly; but beneath the surface there was
even the bitter ring of revolt, and constantly before the girl were
the little gestures, intense, impatient, that conveyed a meaning he
did not voice. She could feel in it all the insistent atmosphere of
the town, where time is counted by seconds. She wondered that he felt
as he did, ignorant that the disquiet had come into his life only
during the past week. To her, the glimpse of activity was fascinating
simply because it was in sharp contrast with her life of comparative,
dull emptiness.

He caught the wistful look on her face.

"You wonder that I rebel," he said, with an odd little throaty laugh.
"I couldn't well appear any more unsophisticated: I might as well tell
you. It's not the work itself, but the lack of anything else but work
that makes the lives of such as I so bare. We are constantly holding a
stop-watch on time itself, fearful of losing a second; the scratch of
a pen sealing the life of a Nation, commuting a death-sentence,
defining the difference between a man's success and ruin can all be
accomplished in a second. If we let that second get away from us, we
have been deaf to Opportunity's knock. We stop at times to think; and
then the object for which we give our all appears so petty and
inadequate, and what we are losing, so great. We laugh at our work at
such times, and for the moment hate it." But he laughed lightly, and
finished with a deprecating little minor.

"You see, I'm relaxing to-night--and thinking."

"But," Miss Willis protested, "I don't see why you should have only
the one thing in your life. It is certainly unnecessary, unless you
choose."

He smiled indulgently.

"You have no conception of what it means to shape your life to your
income. I am poor, and I know. Years ago I had to choose between
mediocrity and"--he looked at her peculiarly--"and love, or
advancement alone. I had to choose, and fixing my choice upon the
higher aim, I had to put everything else out of my life. The thought
is intolerable that my name should always be under another's upon some
office-door. You know what I chose: you know nothing of the constant
struggle which alone keeps me, mind, soul, and body, centred upon my