up?"

The man stirred at her feet, and she put out her hands to him quickly.

"Do I seem brutal?" she cried. "Oh, I don't want to be! Do I seem very
ungenerous and wrapped up in my own side of the thing? I don't mean to
be that, but--I'm not sure. I expect it's that. I'm not sure, and I
think I'm a little frightened." She gave him a brief, anxious smile that
was not without its tenderness. "I'm so sure," she said, "when I'm away
from you. But when you're here--oh, I forget all I've thought of. You
lay your spell upon me."

Ste. Marie gave a little wordless cry of joy. He caught her two hands in
his and held them against his lips. Again that great wave of tenderness
swept her, almost engulfing. But when it had ebbed she sank back once
more in her chair, and she withdrew her hands from his clasp.

"You make me forget too much," she said. "I think you make me forget
everything that I ought to remember. Oh, Ste. Marie, have I any right to
think of love and happiness while this terrible mystery is upon
us--while we don't know whether poor Arthur is alive or dead? You've
seen what it has brought my grandfather to! It is killing him. He has
been much worse in the past fortnight. And my mother is hardly a ghost
of herself in these days. Ah, it is brutal of me to think of my own
affairs--to dream of happiness at such a time." She smiled across at him
very sadly. "You see what you have brought me to!" she said.

Ste. Marie rose to his feet. If Miss Benham, absorbed in that warfare
which raged within her, had momentarily forgotten the cloud of sorrow
under which her household lay, so much the more had he, to whom the