t want any other!"

Stephen stares at the flexible form, and listens to the words that
he would admire, only the cynical suspicion is in his mind that she
is talking for effect. His general habit was to consider all women
mercenary and untrustworthy. Deep in his heart--for he had a heart,
though contracted from want of use--lay a hungry desire to be
loved, really loved for himself; and the very keenness of the
longing, and the anxiety not to be deceived, lessened his powers of
penetration, and blinded him to the girl's character.

He laughs slightly. "You are taking a theatrical view of the whole
thing!"

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, well, that the wife really loves her husband and sticks to him
through everything, and they pass through unheard-of difficulties
together, and so on"; but he adds, with a faint yawn: "I've always
noticed that when the money goes the love disappears too. There's
no love where there's abject poverty."

"But three hundred a year is not abject poverty," answers the girl
in a quiet tone, not denying his theory for fear of being called
again theatrical.

"No," he admits. "Oh, it might do very well as long as there were
only two; but then, when there are children, it means a nurse, and
all sorts of expenses."

He says the words with a simplicity and directness that makes the
girl almost catch her breath. For these two were not on intimate
terms with each other, not even terms of intimate speaking.

Nothing had passed between them yet but the merest society phrases,
and before a certain quiet dinner one month back neither knew of
the other's existence. Since then some chance meetings on the
beach, the parade, the pier, a few long afternoon rows, between
then and now: these are the only nourishment the flame in either
breast has received--a flame kindled in a few long glances across
the dinner-table.

But this afternoon he has laid aside the customary phrases and
deliberately commenced the present conversation.

True, it is purely an abstract one--all theory and hypotheses. No
one could say otherwise if it were repeated. Not a personal word
has been uttered on either side; but the girl feels in the
determined tone of his voice, in the studied way he started it, in
the cold precision with which he follows it, that it is practically
a test conversation of herself, and that she is virtually passing
through an examination.

He has come this afternoon with a set of certain questions that he