you want your reward?"

"No," he answered firmly, "I don't!"

She shrugged her shoulders and kept time with her foot to the music.
Across the table, although she kept silence for a while, she smiled at
him whenever she caught his eye. She was not angry, not even hurt. Philip
had always been so difficult, but in the end so easily led. She had
unlimited confidence in herself.

"Don't be a goose!" she exclaimed at last. "Of course you want your
reward, and of course you'll have it, some day! You've always lived with
your head partly in the clouds, and it's always been my task to pull you
down to earth. I suppose I shall have to do the same again, but to-night
I haven't patience. I feel suddenly gay. You are so nice-looking, Philip,
but you'd look ten times nicer still if you'd only smile once or twice
and look as though you were glad."

The whole thing was a nightmare to him. The horror of it was in his
blood, yet he did his best to obey. Plain speaking just then was
impossible. He drank glass after glass of wine and called for liqueurs.
She held his fingers for a moment under the table.

"Oh, Philip," she whispered, "can't you forget that you have ever been a
school-teacher, dear? We are only human, and did suffer so. You know,"
she went on, "you were made for the things that are coming to us. You've
improved already, ever so much. I like your clothes and the way you carry
yourself. But you look--oh, so sad and so far away all the time! When I
came to your rooms, at my first glimpse of you I knew that you were
miserable. We must alter all that, dear. Tell me how it is that with all
your success you haven't been happy?"

"Memories!" he answered harshly. "Only a few hours before you came,
I was in hell!"

"Then you had better make up your mind," she told him firmly, "that you
are going to climb up out of there, and when you're out, you're going to
stay out. You can't alter the past. You can't alter even the smallest
detail of its setting. Just as inevitably as our lives come and go, so
what has happened is finished with, unchangeable. It is only a weak
person who would spoil the present and the future, brooding. You used not
to be weak, Philip."

"I don't think that I am, really," he said. "I am moody, though, and
that's almost as bad. The sight of you brought it all back. And that
fellow Dane--I've been frightened of him, Beatrice."

"Well, you needn't be any longer," she declared. "What you want is some
one wit