"It is here! now!" he cried, striking his breast passionately with
clenched hand. "It has always been."

"And your love was a great love; there was none greater," she continued;
"or so you said in the rose garden. Yet it is not fine enough, large
enough, to forgive me here, crying now at your feet?"

The man hesitated. His mouth opened; words shaped vainly on his lips.
She had forced him to bare his heart and speak truths which he had hidden
from himself. And she was good to look upon, standing there in a glory
of passion, calling back old associations and warmer life. He turned
away his head that he might not see, but she passed around and fronted
him.

"Look at me, Dave! Look at me! I am the same, after all. And so are
you, if you would but see. We are not changed."

Her hand rested on his shoulder, and his had half-passed, roughly, about
her, when the sharp crackle of a match startled him to himself. Winapie,
alien to the scene, was lighting the slow wick of the slush lamp. She
appeared to start out against a background of utter black, and the flame,
flaring suddenly up, lighted her bronze beauty to royal gold.

"You see, it is impossible," he groaned, thrusting the fair-haired woman
gently from him. "It is impossible," he repeated. "It is impossible."

"I am not a girl, Dave, with a girl's illusions," she said softly, though
not daring to come back to him. "It is as a woman that I understand. Men
are men. A common custom of the country. I am not shocked. I divined
it from the first. But--ah!--it is only a marriage of the country--not a