ldered--bent down over her and found her lips; but
almost absently, out of a daze.

"No, not like that," she murmured. "In the old way."

There was a long embrace.

"I wouldn't do it," she said, "I don't believe I'd have the courage to
do it, if it were just me. But there's some one else--I've made some one
a promise. I can't tell you about that. Now please go back and sit over
there where you were, where we can talk quietly.--Oh, Roddy, I love you
so!--No, please go back, old man! And--and light your pipe. Oh, don't
tremble like that! It--it isn't a tragedy. It's--for us, it's the
greatest hope in the world."

He went back to his chair. He even lighted his pipe as she asked him to,
and waited as steadily as he could for her to begin.

But she couldn't begin while she looked at him. She moved a little
closer to the table and leaned her elbow on it, shaded her eyes with one
hand, while the other played with the stump of a pencil that happened to
be lying there.

"Do you remember ..." she began, and it was wonderful how quiet and
steady her voice was. There was even the trace of a smile about her
wonderful mouth. "Do you remember that afternoon of ours, the very first
of them, when you brought home my note-books and found me asleep on the
couch in our old back parlor? Do you remember how you told me that one's
desires were the only motive power he had? One couldn't ride anywhere,
you said, except on the backs of his own passions? Well, it was a funny
thing--I got to wondering afterward what my desires were, and it seemed
I hadn't any. Everything had, somehow, come to me before I knew I wanted
it. Everything in the world, even your love for me, came like that.

"But I've got a passion now, Rodney. I've had it for a long while. It's
a desire I can't satisfy. The thing I want, and there's nothing in the
world that I wouldn't give to get it, is--well, your friendship; that's
a way of saying it."

What he had been waiting to hear, of course, she didn't know. But she
knew by the way he started and stared at her, that it hadn't been for
that. The thing struck him, it seemed, as a sort of grotesquely
irritating anti-climax.

"Gracious Heaven!" he said. "My friendship! Why, I'm in love with you!
That's certainly a bigger thing. Go back to your geometry, child. The
greater includes the less, doesn't it?"

"I don't know whether it's a bigger thing or not," she said. "But it
doesn't include the other. Love's just a sort o