ths," she
answered, "and oh! _how_ they burn!"

"Let me lift you in my arms and carry you over them, then, that your
feet may not touch. Do not be unjust to yourself. Cannot you see how
right, how good it is? It is not as if I came to you from another
woman----"

The girl faced around on him almost fiercely.

"No, you could not be so bad as that! To have felt the morning kiss of
another woman, to have watched her good-night smile, and then to have
come to me--that would have been too base, too degrading--I should have
hated you because I despised you. I should have loathed you
instead----"

"Of loving me! Be honest and true, little Jean--you do care."

"Yes, I have cared."

"And do still?"

"Yes."

Her tone was as cold and as clear as the sound of an icicle striking
the frozen earth in the fall. It angered him, and his voice shook
roughly.

"A man who binds up his life in the love of a woman is a fool! Because
she is all the world to him, all he works to receive praise from, all
he fears in the blaming, he thinks her capable of as much love as
himself. And even as he watches, he sees her pass from fervor into
apathy. Her affection is but the dry husks of what he hoped to find.
You never cared!"

"Grant," she said, earnestly, "you have told me to be honest. I will
be. I think"--with a little laugh--"that if I had been a man I should
not have been a coward. I shall not be now. You wrong me and yourself
when you say that I never cared. It is because my caring has been so
much a part of myself that I have never been able to stand aloof and
look and comment upon it. It was just me. When I lived, it lived;
when I die----"

"My love!"

"When--no. I do not believe it can die even then! I think it is a
part of my soul, and will outstand all time."

She hesitated as if devising words to express herself with even more
sweet abandon. There was a certain loving recklessness in what she
uttered now:

"Not care? I wish you, too, would understand! Perhaps it is because
we care in such different ways. I don't know, but to me it has been
all! There is no joy, no pleasure, however petty, through all the day,
but it brings with it the swift desire to share it with you. Every
morning I waken with your half-uttered name on my lips, as though, when
I slipped hack through the portals of consciousness into the world of
reality, I came only to find you, as a timid child awakes and calls
feebly for i