ons." Lindsay
visaged the words with a smile, but they had an articulated hardness.

Alicia raised her eyebrows.

"What do you expect one to imagine?" she asked, with quietness.

"A miracle," he said sombrely.

"Ah, that's difficult!"

There was silence for a moment between them, then she added perversely--

"And, you know, faith is not what it was."

Duff sat biting his lips. Her dryness irritated him. He was accustomed
to find in her fields of delicately blooming enthusiasms, and running
watercourses where his satisfactions were ever reflected. Suddenly she
seemed to emerge to her own consciousness, upon a summit from which she
could look down upon the turmoil in herself and beyond it, to where he
stood.

"Don't make a mistake," she said. "Don't." She thrust her hand for
a fraction of an instant toward him, and then swiftly withdrew it,
gathering herself together to meet what he might say.

What he did say was simple, and easy to hear. "That's what everybody
will tell me; but I thought you might understand." He tapped the toe of
his boot with his stick as if he counted the strokes. She looked down
and counted them too.

"Then you won't help me to marry her?" he said, definitely, at last.

"What could I do?" She twisted her sapphire ring. "Ask somebody else."

"Don't expect me to believe there is nothing you could do. Go to her as
my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good
you know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid
colours of the lost."

The face she turned upon him was all little sharp white angles, and
the cloud of fair hair above her temples stood out stiffly, suggesting
Celine and the curling tongs. She did not lose her elegance; the poise
of her chin and shoulders was quite perfect, but he thought she
looked too amusedly at his difficulty. Her negative, too, was more
unsympathetic than he had any reason to expect.

"No," she said. "It must be somebody else. Don't ask me. I should become
involved--I might do harm." She had surmounted her emotion; she was able
to look at the matter with surprising clearness and decision. "I should
do harm," she repeated.

"You don't count with her effect on you."

"You can't possibly imagine her effect on me. I'm not a man."

"But won't you take anything--about her--from me? You know I'm really
not a fool--not even very impressionable?"

"Oh no!" she said impatiently. "No--of course not."

"Pray why?"

"T