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 ness that he had never seen her wear. "What a nice prince!" she was saying in quiet tones that sent a dull pain through him, for it was an answer to his question, and an answer in the negative.

He remained silent, for there were no words for the surging emotions that crowded up into his throat.

Olga was shaking her head, a little pensively. "You don't know me," she said, and her tone had turned almost sharp.

"What does that matter?" he cried, half scornfully. "If one is in love, and has been for months, isn't that enough?"

She shook her head again. "No, not enough—all the more, if one is really in love. If love weren't there it wouldn't so much matter."

"Don't talk nonsense!" he cried, pushing his chair from the table in a wild need to plead his cause with some language more potent than words.

She warded him off with her hand. She was drawing herself out of a revery which seemed to include him, without centering around him.

"No," she said, as if finding an answer to her own thoughts, "It's as stupid to think impractical things as it is to do them. Life is bargaining."

"It's unbearable to hear you talk like that," cried Grover, almost at breaking point. Then he returned to the charge armed with logic. "Mettons que c'est un troc—even on that basis you can't have more to gain by staying on here. You've been here two years;