f tone. Thank you for understanding,
thank you for a thought--very, very precious, a thought beautiful."

He smeared the air with inverted thumb and smiled at Mr. Frawley, who
rose, somewhat agitated, and, crooking one lank arm behind his back,
made a mechanical pinch at an atmospheric atom.

"If--if you do that again--if you dare to recite those verses about me,
I shall go! I tell you I can't stand any more," breathed Aphrodite
between her clenched teeth.

The young man cast his large and rather sickly eyes upon her. For a
moment he was in doubt, but belief in the witchery of sound prevailed,
for he had yet to meet a being insensible to the "music of the soul,"
and so with a fond and fatuous murmur he pinched the martyred atmosphere
once more, and began, mousily:

ALL

A tear a year
My pale desire requires,
And that is all.
Enlacements weary, passion tires,
Kisses are cinder-ghosts of fires
Smothered at birth with mortal earth;
And that is all.

A year of fear
My pallid soul desires
And that is all--
Terror of bliss and dread of happiness,
A subtle need of sorrow and distress
And you to weep one tear, no more, no less,
And that is all I ask--
And that is all.

People were breathing thickly; the poet unaffectedly distilled the
suggested tear; it was a fat tear; it ran smoothly down his nose,
twinkled, trembled, and fell.

Aphrodite's features had become tense; she half rose, hesitated. Then,
as the young man in the stock turned his invalid's eyes in her direction
and began:

Oh, sixteen tears
In sixteen years----

she transfixed her hat with one nervous gesture sprang to her feet,
turned, and vanished through the door.

"She is too young to endure it," sobbed the by-product to her of the
sketchy face. And that was no idle epigram, either.

[Illustration]

XIV

[Illustration]

She had no definite idea; all she craved for was the open--or its
metropolitan substitute--sunshine, air, the glimpse of sanely
preoccupied faces, the dull, quickening tumult of traffic. The tumult
grew, increasing in her ears as she crossed Washington Square under the
sycamores and looked up through tender feathery foliage at the white
arch of marble through which the noble avenue flows away between its
splendid arid chasms of marble, bronze, and masonry to that blessed
leafy oasis in the north--the Park.