“I’m afraid,” she kept saying, “I don’t want to. I’m afraid.” What a queer silent frightened love-making it was--no love-making at all. She was afraid and I was afraid, not of her husband but of myself. Later she went away crying silently along the hallway and after that she and I did not sit at our two windows or walk in the park and I returned to my books. Once, on a night two or three weeks later as I lay in my own bedroom, I heard the husband and wife talking together. Something had happened that had pleased and excited her. She had been able to offer something she thought would help her husband and was urging him to give up being a street-car conductor and to go back to the town from which they had come. Her father owned a store there, I gathered, and had objected to her marriage but she had secretly written, perhaps been very humble, and had persuaded her father to take the younger man into partnership in his business. “Don’t be proud now, Jim. I’m not proud any more. Something has happened to me Jim. I’m not proud any more,” I heard her saying as I lay in my own room in the darkness, and I leave the reader to judge whether, under the circumstances, I could be proud. But perhaps after all the woman and I have done something for each other, I thought. NOTE IX ON a certain Sunday morning of that summer I found myself sitting in a little garden under apple trees back of a red brick house that had green window blinds and that stood on the side of a hill near the edge of an Illinois town of some five or six thousand people. Sitting by a small table near me was a dark slender man with pale cheeks, a man I had never seen until late on the evening before and who I had half thought would die but a few hours earlier. Now, although the morning was warm, he had a blanket wrapped around him and his thin hands, lying on the table, trembled. Together we were drinking our morning coffee, containing a touch of brandy. A robin hopped on the grass near by and the sunlight falling through the branches of the trees made yellow patches at our feet. I sat in silence filled with wonder at the strangeness of the circumstances that had brought me to the spot and of my own mood. The garden in which we sat had a gravel path running down through the centre and on one side vegetables grew, with narrow beds of flowers about the vegetable plots. Along the further side against a fence were tall berry bushes and on our side there was grass under the trees and near by a tall hedge of elders. Looking toward the foot of the garden one got a view of a river valley dotted with farmhouses and beyond the elders there was a road that led along a hillside down into town.