"I can--I will," she answered in a broken voice, and it seemed to her
that all the bitterness had turned to sweetness in his look. Was the
divine wisdom, after all, she wondered, not so much the courage which
turned the events that came to happiness as the greater power which
created light where there was nothing. Only age had learned to do this,
she knew, and she was conscious of a quick resentment against fate that
only age could put into passion the immortal spirit which youth craved
in vain.

"I asked a great deal," he said, "but I shall be content with a very
little."

"With my whole faith--with all my friendship," she replied; and as she
spoke the words, her heart contracted with a spasm which was almost that
of terror of the unknown purpose to which she felt, with a kind of
superstitious blindness, that she was pledged. Fate had offered her
this one good thing, and she must put it from her because she waited in
absolute ignorance--for what? For love it might be, and yet her woman's
instinct taught her that the only love which endures is the love of age
that has never been young for youth so elastic that it can never grow
old. Then swift as the flash of self-revelation she saw in imagination
the eager yet humble look with which Arnold Kemper had waited before her
door, and, though she insisted still that the picture displeased her
fancy, she knew that passion to meet response in her must come to her
clothed in a virile strength like his.

"I wish from my soul that it might have been," she murmured, but even
with the words she knew that she had all her life wished for a different
thing--for a love that was wholly unlike the love he offered.