vat-tier's clients struggling to bring his shirt into proper
connection with the _chef d'oeuvre_, when he should arise to attire
himself for the day. She laughed outright. Then she grew sober and said:

"We ought to go back; it must be after five."

He took out his watch.

"No, it is not."

"Yes, it is; it was after four when we left the _pension_. I know it's
after five now."

"It is not after five," he declared calmly; "it is not after five
because it is after six."

She laughed again; he looked at her, smiling brightly himself.

"It is good together, _n'est-ce pas_?" he said, putting his hand upon
her arm as they turned back upon their steps. There was in his eyes the
happy look that dispelled every trace of the usual shadow on his face.
"We are again those same children," he went on, "children that the same
toy amuses both. What pleasures you always makes joy for me also."

Something came up in her throat as she listened. It might have been a
choke, but she was so positive that it was only Genoa that she swallowed
it at once and looked in the opposite direction. He had kept his hand
upon her arm, and now he bent his head a little and said, his voice
lowering:

"I think--"

The dusk was gathering heavily. The Siegesthor loomed blackly great
against the lights of the city beyond. It was no longer quiet about
them, but the hum and buzz of all the bees swarming home was in the air,
on the pavement, along the trolley wires.

"I think,"--he said, his fingers closing about her arm,--"I think that
we might be always very happy together."

She looked up quickly, and then down yet more quickly.

"Why do you speak that way when you know that I am going so soon?"

"Let us turn here," he said eagerly; "by here it will be quiet. Do walk
so," he added pleadingly, as she hesitated, "we have not long to be
together. _Il faut me gater un peu._ There is but a week left for us."

She started.

"A week! If we sail the nineteenth we need not leave here until the
fourteenth surely."

"But your cousin will leave on the eighth."

She looked up at him, and by the light of a street lamp which they were
just passing, he saw the great tears starting in her eyes, tears of
helplessness, the tears of a woman who feels and cannot speak. It was a
very quiet little street, that into which they had turned, with lines of
monotonous gray houses on either side, and certainly no better place for
tears was ever invented. Rosina's app