giving--giving peace and mothering and delight, giving the sky and the earth and the very air they breathed. Only some one who has ever made a gift of a day knows the joy that it is--how each golden moment, conscious of its own beauty, hangs poised like a held breath; how the sun and wind and flowers and the upward curves of the supporting earth are all parts of the gift, making the giver a god who pours out creation for his friend. The next day they took train to Pisa on a more sophisticated errand, since he had undertaken to make a sketch of the tower for a friend who was "sheeking" some Italian backgrounds. Sophia wandered happily about the town while he did so, and then they met for lunch in the garden of an old inn. "I'm afraid of to-day," he told her, "because it can't be as perfect as yesterday. Nothing could--that's the worst of a day like that." "I'll _make_ it as perfect," Sophia replied, and she kept her word. She still had no idea she loved him, she only knew that she wanted to shield and protect him, that she was happy with him and felt the power to make him happy, and that she trusted him utterly. Without realizing it, she tempted him cruelly by her very trust, and that day her calm recklessness of speech, her gaze that meeting his so straight and untroubled, disturbed him so profoundly, were too much for him. "Take off your glove," he said suddenly. Sophia's notions of love had been culled from books, and she considered it inseparable from what she termed "thrills." How was she to know that a woman, especially what is called a "nice" woman, can love without the promptings of the pulses? Because she felt no sensuous "thrill" as the tone of command, it never occurred to her to think she could be in love, wherein she was making another common literary mistake--that of thinking that every woman enjoys being mastered. Sophia found her joy in ready compliance with the demands of the beloved, not in arranging set scenes of clashing wills and conciliations. Taking off her glove, she gave him her hand. "When I say that I want to kiss you now," he said, "it doesn't mean in the way it would have, even a day or two ago. I told you then you affected me . . . but now it would be because I love you." Sophia's hand moved slightly in his. "Yes," she said hesitatingly, "in a way--of course. I know you're very fond of me--and all that." "In _the_ way," he returned, "and I'm not fit to hold your hand. D'you know what the life of an average man is like--especially of a man in my circumstances?" "You mean--women?" "Yes--bought women," he said brutally. "Does it make a lot of difference to you?" Sophia, refusing to let her mind so much as dwell with any effort of realization on his confession, closed her hand firmly over his. "It doesn't make any difference. Nothing does. If I could look after you--if you were free to be looked after--you wouldn't have to go to other women any more. I care about you more than about any man I've ever met."