apid voice she bent her
face, brilliant with colour, and very sweet; and he looked up into it,
expectant, uncertain.

"If such a friendship as ours is to become worth anything to you--to me,
why should it trouble you that I know--and am thinking of things that
concern you? Is it because the confidence is one-sided? Is it because
you have given and I have listened and given nothing in return to
balance the account? I do give--interest, deep interest, sympathy if you
ask it; I give confidence in return--if you desire it!"

"What can a girl like you need of sympathy?" he said smiling.

"You don't know! you don't know! If heredity is a dark vista, and if
you must stare through it all your life, sword in hand, always on your
guard, do you think you are the only one?"

"Are you--one?" he said incredulously.

"Yes"--with an involuntary shudder--"not that way. It is easier for me;
I think it is--I know it is. But there are things to combat--impulses,
a recklessness, perhaps something almost ruthless. What else I do not
know, for I have never experienced violent emotions of any sort--never
even deep emotion."

"You are in love!"

"Yes, thoroughly," she added with conviction, "but not violently. I--"
she hesitated, stopped short, leaning forward, peering at him through
the dusk; and: "Mr. Siward! are you laughing?" She rose and he stood up
instantly.

There was lightning in her darkening eyes now; in his something that
glimmered and danced. She watched it, fascinated, then of a sudden the
storm broke and they were both laughing convulsively, face to face there
under the stars.

"Mr. Siward," she breathed, "I don't know what I am laughing at; do you?
Is it at you? At myself? At my poor philosophy in shreds and tatters? Is
it some infernal mirth that you seem to be able to kindle in me--for I
never knew a man like you before?"

"You don't know what you were laughing at?" he repeated. "It was
something about love--"

"No I don't know why I laughed! I--I don't wish to, Mr. Siward. I do
not desire to laugh at anything you have made me say--anything you may
infer--"

"I don't infer--"

"You do! You made me say something--about my being ignorant of deep,
of violent emotion, when I had just informed you that I am thoroughly,
thoroughly in love--"

"Did I make you say all that, Miss Landis?"

"You did. Then you laughed and made me laugh too. Then you--"

"What did I do then?" he asked, far too humbly.

"You--you in