ted Grace patiently.

"No--loved him. I know. Dear, your theories are sound in a general way,
but what is a girl going to do about it when she loves a man? You say
a young girl can't love--doesn't know how. But I do love, though it
is true that I don't know how to love very wisely. What is the use in
denying it? This winter has been a deafening, stupefying fever to me.
The sheer noise of it stunned me until I forgot how I did feel about
anything. Then--I don't know--somehow, in the rain out there, I began
to wake ... Dear, the old instincts, the old desires, the old truths, came
back out of chaos; that full feeling here"--she laid her fingers on
her throat--"the sense of expectancy, the restless hope growing out
of torpid acquiescence--all returned; and, dearest, with them all came
memories of him. What am I to do? Could you tell me?"

For a long while Mrs. Ferrall sat in troubled silence, her hand shading
her eyes. Sylvia, leaning over her desk, idling with pen and pencil,
looked around from time to time, as though awaiting the opinion of
some specialist who, in full possession of the facts, now had become
responsible for the patient.

"If you marry him," said Mrs. Ferrall quietly, "your life will become a
hell."

"Yes. But would it make life any easier for him?" asked Sylvia.

"How--to know that you had been dragged down?"

"No. I mean could I do anything for him?"

"No woman ever did. That is a sentimental falsehood of the emotional.
No woman ever did help a man in that way. Sylvia, if love were the only
question, and if you do truly love him, I--well, I suppose I'd be fool
enough to advise you to be a fool. Even then you'd be sorry. You know
what your future may be; you know what you are fitted for. What can
you do without Howard? In this town your role would be a very minor one
without Howard's money, and you know it."

"Yes, I know it."

"And your sacrifice could not help that doomed boy."

Sylvia nodded assent.

"Then, is there any choice? Is there any question of what to do?"

Sylvia looked out into the winter sky, through the tops of snowy trees;
everywhere the stark, deathly rigidity of winter. Under it, frozen, lay
the rain that had scented the air. Under her ambition lay the ghosts of
yesterday.

"No," she said, "there is no question of choice. I know what must be."

Grace, seated in the firelight, looked up as Sylvia rose from her desk
and came across the room; and when she sank down on the