"Your dress is very becoming," I said irrelevantly. "I hoped it would meet your approval," she mocked. "I've been trying to identify the shade. It's elusive--like you." "Don't be banal.... What is the colour?" "Poinsetta!" "Pretty nearly," she agreed, critically. I took the soft crepe between my fingers. "Poet!" she smiled. "No, it isn't quite poinsetta. It's nearer the red-orange of a tree I remember one autumn, in the White Mountains, with the setting sun on it. But that wasn't what we were talking about. Laurels! Your laurels." "My laurels," I repeated. "Such as they are, I fling them into your lap." "Do you think they increase your value to me, Hugh?" "I don't know," I said thickly. She shook her head. "No, it's you I like--not the laurels." "But if you care for me--?" I began. She lifted up her hands and folded them behind the knot of her hair. "It's extraordinary how little you have changed since we were children, Hugh. You are still sixteen years old, that's why I like you. If you got to be the sultan of sultans yourself, I shouldn't like you any better, or any worse." "And yet you have just declared that power appeals to you!" "Power--yes. But a woman--a woman like me--wants to be first, or nothing." "You are first," I asserted. "You always have been, if you had only realized it." She gazed up at me dreamily. "If you had only realized it! If you had only realized that all I wanted of you was to be yourself. It wasn't what you achieved. I didn't want you to be like Ralph or the others." "Myself? What are you trying to say?" "Yourself. Yes, that is what I like about you. If you hadn't been in such a hurry--if you hadn't misjudged me so. It was the power in you, the craving, the ideal in you that I cared for--not the fruits of it. The fruits would have come naturally. But you forced them, Hugh, for quicker results." "What kind of fruits?" I asked. "Ah," she exclaimed, "how can I tell what they might have been! You have striven and striven, you have done extraordinary things, but have they made you any happier? have you got what you want?" I stooped down and seized her wrists from behind her head. "I want you, Nancy," I said. "I have always wanted you. You're more wonderful to-day than you have ever been. I could find myself--with you." She closed her eyes. A dreamy smile was on her face, and she lay unresisting, very still. In that tremendous moment, for which it seemed I had waited a lifetime, I could have taken her in my arms--and yet I did not. I could not tell why: perhaps it was because she seemed to have passed beyond me--far beyond--in realization. And she was so still! "We have missed the way, Hugh," she whispered, at last. "But we can find it again, if we seek it together," I urged.