It was late afternoon. The fiery sun had just dipped below the jagged Adirondack hill-peaks to the south, still casting a carmine glow between the scattered and low-boughed pines. The square window of the high-ceiled sanitarium room was specked with pale-appearing stars, and the snow-draped slopes beneath showed dim in the elusive beauty that lurks in soft color and low tones. Daunt lay silent, facing the window, and Margaret, tired from romping with the doctor’s children, rested on a low hassock beside his reclining chair. Slowly the carmine faded from the snow, and the hastening winter-dark trailed its violescent gossamer up and down the rock-clefts and across the purpling hollows.He turned his eyes, all at once feeling her lifted gaze. He reached out his right hand and touched the lace edge of her white nurse’s cap, with a faint smile. Something in the smile and the gesture caught at her heart. She leaned suddenly toward him, and taking his hand in both her own, laid her face upon it.

He drew his hand away, breathing sharply.

“Dear!” she said. “Do you remember that afternoon on the sands? You kissed me then! I am the same Margaret now—not changed at all.”

A shudder passed over him, but he did not reply.

Then she knelt beside him, quite close, laying her cheek by his face on the pillow and drawing his one live hand up to her lips. “You are everything to me,” she whispered—“everything, everything! That day on the beach I was happy; but not more happy, dear, than I am now. You were everything else in the world to me then, but now you are me, myself! Don’t turn away; look at me!” Reaching over, she drew his nerveless left arm across her neck.

He turned his face to her with an effort, his lips struggling to speak.

“Kiss me!” she commanded.

He tried to push her back. “No! No!” he cried vehemently, drawing away. “That’s past.”

“Not even that! Just think how long I’ve waited!” She was smiling. “Richard,” she said, “do you know what it means for a woman to kneel to a man like this? I haven’t a bit of pride about it. Only think how ashamed I will be if you refuse to take me! What does a woman do when a man refuses her?”

A white pain had settled upon Daunt’s face. “Margaret,” he faltered, “don’t; I can’t stand it! You don’t know what you say.”

She kissed his hand again. “Yes, I do! I am saying just as plainly as I can that I love you; that I belong to you, and that I ask for nothing else but to belong to you as long as I live.”

His hand made a motion of protest.“I want you just as much as I did the day you first kissed me. I want the right to stay with you always and care for you.”

He winced visibly. “‘Care for me!’” he repeated. “It would be all care. I have nothing to bring you now but sorrow and regret. I’m not the Daunt who offered himself to you at Warne. I’m only a fragment. I had health and hopes then. I had beautiful dreams, Margaret—dreams of work and a home and you. I shan’t ever forget those dreams, but they can never come true!”

She smoothed his hand caressingly. “I have had dreams, too,” she answered. “This is the one that comes oftenest of all. It is about you and me.” She turned her head, with a spot of color in either cheek. “Sometimes it is in the day. You are lying, writing away at a new book of yours, and I am filling your pipe for you, while the tea is getting hot. I see you smile up to me and say, ‘Clever girl! how did you know I wanted a smoke?’ Then you read your last chapter to me, and I tell you how I wouldn’t have said it the way the woman in the story does, and you pretend you are going to change it, and don’t.

“Sometimes it is in the evening, and we are looking out at the sunset just as we have been doing to-night.”

He would have spoken, but she covered his mouth with her hand. His moist breath wrapped her palm.

“And then it is dark and there is a big red lamp on the table—the one I had in my old room—and I am reading the latest novel to you, and when we have got to the end, you are telling me how you would have done it.”

While she had been speaking, glowing and dark-eyed, a mystical peace—a divine forgetfulness had touched him. He lifted his hand to his forehead, feeling her soft fingers. The pictures she painted were so sweet!

Presently he threw his arm down with a swallowed sob. The dream-scene faded, and he lay once more helpless and despairing, weighted with the heaviness of useless limbs, a numb burden for whom there could be no love, no joy, nothing but the inevitable rebuke of enduring pain. He smoothed the wide dun-gold waves of her hair gently.

“You are not for such a sacrifice, Margaret,” he said sadly. “I am not such a coward. You are a woman—a perfect, beautiful woman—the kind that God made all happiness for.”

“But I couldn’t be happy without you!” she cried.

“Nor with me,” he answered. “No, I’ve got to face it! All the long years I should watch that womanhood of yours growing dimmer and less full, your outlook narrowing, your life’s sympathies shrinking. I shall be shut up to myself and grow away from the world, but you shall not grow away from it with me! It would be a crime! I should come to hate myself. I want you to live your life out worthily. I would rather remember you as you are now, and as loving me once for what I was!”Margaret’s eyes were closed. She was thinking of Melwin and Lydia.

“Woman needs more to fill her life than the love of a man’s mind. She wants more, dear. She wants the love of the heart-beat. She wants home—the home I wanted to make for you—the kind I used to dream of—the——” His voice broke here and failed.

The door pushed open without a knock. A tiny night-gowned figure stood swaying on the sill, outlined sharply against the glare of lamp-light.

“Vere’s ’iss Mar’det?” he said in high baby key. “I yants her to tiss me dood-night!”

Margaret’s hand still lay against Daunt’s cheek, and as she drew it away, she felt a great hot tear suddenly wet her fingers.

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