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74 white face and the brilliant black eyes; she felt, looking back, that he had shown a restraint which was something more than boyish. When he took her in his arms just before he fled he had not kissed her, though, for that matter, she had been perfectly ready to let him do it.

That moment kept recurring to her—the beating on the door, the voices in the hall, the shouts, and the arms of Andrew Lanning around her, and his tense, desperate face close to hers. It became less dreamlike that moment. It became a living thing that grew more and more vivid. She began to understand that if she lived to be a hundred, she would never find that memory dimmer. Men had made love to her, had poured out their hearts before her, but only once she had seen the soul of a man. And very naturally she kept thinking: What did he see in return? No, he had not seen the truth, but he had taken away a picture to worship. It was not strange that she did not hold this against young Lanning.

When her eyes were misty with this thought, and a half-sad, half-happy smile was touching the corners of her mouth, Charles Merchant knocked at her door. Truly it was a most inopportune moment, but, since she had promised to become his wife, Charles made a common masculine mistake—he considered that she was already a possession and that even her thoughts belonged to him. She gave herself one moment in which to clear the wistfulness from her face, one moment to banish the queer pain of knowing that she would never see this wild Andrew again, and then she told Charles to come in.

In fact, he was already opening the door, and she resented this fiercely. Besides, there was a ragged crack across the door where they had battered it down early that day. Then Charles stood before her. He was calm