there, and the ducks which rose in great numbers and flew round and
round the park, dropping one by one into the water. "You will never
see Riversdale again, perhaps?"

"Perhaps not," she answered; and hearing her say it, his future life
seemed to him as forlorn as the landscape.

"What will you do? What will become of you? What strange
transformation has taken place in you?"

"If--But what is the use of going over it again?"

"If what?"

"What would you have me do? Marriage would only ruin you, Owen, make
you very unhappy. Why do you want me to enter on a life which I feel
isn't mine, and which could only end in disaster for both of us." He
asked her why it would end in disaster, and she answered, "It is
impossible to lay bare one's whole heart. When one changes one's
ideas one changes one's friends."

"Because one's friends are only the embodiment of one's ideas. But I
cannot admit that you would be unhappy as my wife."

"Everybody is unhappy when they are not doing what Nature intended
them to do."

"And what did Nature intend you to do? Only to sing operas?"

"I should be sorry to think Nature intended me for nothing else.