utation, and the familiarity of the sight of him was plain in the
response he got, equally general and equally cheerful. Lieutenant
Da Cruz's smile was even further significant, if he had thought of
interpreting it, and there was overt amiability in the manner in which
Ensign Sand put her hymn-books together and packed everybody, including
her husband, whose arm she took, out of the way.

"Wait for me," Laura said, to whom a Eurasian beggar made elaborate
appeal, as they moved off.

"I guess you've got company to see you home," Mrs. Sand called out, and
they did not wait. As Lindsay came closer the East Indian paused in his
tale of the unburied wife for whom he could not afford a coffin, and
slipped away.

"The Ensign knows she oughtn't to talk like that," Laura said. Lindsay
marked with a surge of pleasure that she was flushed, and seemed
perturbed.

"What she said was quite true," he ventured.

"But--anybody would think--"

"What would anybody think? Shall we keep to this side of the road? It's
quieter. What would anybody think?"

"Oh, silly things." Laura threw up her head with a half laugh. "Things I
needn't mention."

Lindsay was silent for an instant. Then "Between us?" he asked, and she
nodded.

Their side of the street, along the square, was nearly empty. He found
her hand and drew it through his arm. "Would you mind so very much," he
said, "if those silly things were true?" He spoke as if to a child. His
passion was never more clearly a single object to him, divorced from all
complicating and non-essential impressions of her. "I would give all I
possess to have it so," he told her, catching at any old foolish phrase
that would serve.

"I don't believe you mean anything like all you say, Mr. Lindsay." Her
head was bent and she kept her hand within his arm. He seemed to be
a circumstance that brought her reminiscences of how one behaved
sentimentally toward a young man with whom there was no serious
entanglement. It is not surprising that he saw only one thing, walls
going down before him, was aware only of something like invitation.
Existence narrowed itself to a single glowing point; as he looked it
came so near that he bounded to meet it.

"Dear," he said, "you can't know--there is no way of telling you--what I
mean. I suppose every man feels the same thing about the woman he loves;
but it seems to me that my life had never known the sun until I saw you.
I can't explain to you how poor it was, a