'Noakes, you are disillusioning, and incorrect, and moreover traitorous to your kind.' 'Not a bit of it; you overpraise my kind.' 'But--let's be definite--you know he may be all--' 'And may not always have been; in which connection he may not be expected to enlighten the dreaming lady, may he?' 'I think he may.' 'But he may possess a certain masculine trait, a kind of secretiveness.' 'Secretive,' she mused. 'Then he is a bit of a coward, I think.' 'He would be a cad,' Noakes said quickly, 'to tell her things that would pain her.' 'Understanding will come sooner or later,' she said oracularly. 'It is better to become accustomed to a thing than have it come as a revelation.' 'I see,' Noakes said; 'like taking a tonic in midwinter to fend off spring fever. You forget,' he continued in a different tone, looking at her speculatively, 'that understanding may never come.' 'Then he has put her on a lower intellectual plane; he has withheld from her, as he might from a child.' 'No, he has loved her too well to hurt her.' 'Loved her so ill that he has deceived her from the beginning.' 'To my mind there is something active in deception; this would be rather an omission.' 'An omission that is an insult to her.' 'Not at all!' Noakes spoke somewhat vehemently. 'Don't think I mean,' she said, 'that there should be a detailed interchange of trivial confidence. That would be tiresome. If, however, there were one big thing in his life that might influence her feeling toward him, he should tell it, and let her judge.' 'Not smooth over a disagreeable occurrence?' 'Never! It would be cruel.' Noakes sat very still. 'If I were the girl,--' she began, and checked the speech with a faint laugh. 'But we will not be dramatic, nor personal.' Noakes told himself he had always known that this was her thought; she was too clear-hearted to feel anything else. The understanding of which she had half-seriously spoken must never come, and the only means of avoiding it was to-night's silence, the silence of all the days to follow. He foresaw the revelation which might come, and realized that any abnegation was worthless except the sacrifice of his love. Alive, aware of its possible fulfillment, he could not condemn himself to the sacrifice. She had not asked it of him, and he would not face that which she might ask if he obeyed the weak voice which counseled a surrender to her judgment. To the last intoxicating drop he would drink, in reverent loving-thankfulness for the draught vouchsafed him. He would care, not in fearful accumulation of credit against a day of reckoning, but in surrender to the brimming abundance of their store. He would secure to her freedom from that possible pain by following the inevitable trend.