Granted that Desire might love, there was no reason on earth why she
should not love John.

The conclusion seemed childishly simple and yet he had never
seriously considered it. Why? Relentlessly he forced himself to
answer why. It was because he had believed that when Desire woke to
love, if she should so wake, she would wake to love for him! He tore
this admission out of a shrinking heart and laughed at it. It was
funny, quite funny in its ridiculous conceit. . . . But it hadn't
been conceit, it had been assurance. Impossible to account for, and
absurd as it seemed now, it was some-thing higher than vanity which
had hidden in his heart that happy sense of kinship with Desire
which had made John's warning seem an emptiness of words.

It was gone now, that wonderful sense of "belonging," swept away in
the swift rush of startled doubt. Searching as it might, his mind
could not find anywhere the faintest foothold for a belief that
Desire, free to choose, should turn to him and not to another.

"I had better go and sleep this off somewhere," murmured the
professor with a wry smile. "Mustn't let it get ahead of me. Mustn't
make any more mistakes. This needs thinking out--steady now!"

He tried to forget his own problem in thinking of hers. It couldn't
be very pleasant for her--this. And yet she had been smiling as she
came out of John's office. perhaps she did not know yet? On second
thoughts, he felt sure that she did not know. He recognized the
essentials of Desire. She was loyalty itself. And had he not reason
to know from his own present experience that the beginnings of love