"Do you still intend to marry me?" "Won't you give me a few days more to think it over?" "No, I will not. And--do you need them? Haven't you already made up your mind?" She sighed and looked out of the window. They were driving up Fifth Avenue and the bright street was full of color and life. The busses and motors were filled with women on their way to the shops, whose gay windows were the most enticing in the world. New York, in this, her River of Delight, looked as if she had not a care in the world. Madame Zattiany did not speak again until they were in the Park. "I have promised to marry you, remember; and I do not lightly go back on my word. . . . But . . . I had intended to ask if you would be willing to let me go alone to Vienna for six months--and then join me----" "After I had lost you completely! I shall marry you here, today, or not at all. I love you but I'll not let you play with me. I'll go to Austria with you, and you may do as you choose when you get there. You'll belong to me and I'll make the best of it." "If I married you now it would not be worth my while to return to Austria. . . . You see, I'd be an American. I'd no longer be Graefin Zattiany. . . . I could accomplish nothing. . . . It is the strangest thing in the world, but I never had thought of changing my name----" "Until Hohenhauer reminded you, I suppose. Well, I could have told you that myself. I had counted on it, if you want to know the truth." "Ah! Then you counted on that to--to----" "To have you altogether. Yes." And then he added hastily: "But up there--you must believe this--I never gave it a thought--after--after you promised to marry me at once." He doubted if she had listened to this protest that there had been an hour when in the complete baring of his soul he had been above plotting and subterfuge. She was still looking out of the window. He saw her long upward-curving nostril grow rigid. But she said quietly: "And what do you think you would have done with me, Lee, after we were on the plane of common mortals once more? Transports do not last for ever, you know, and we are not heedless young things with no thought of the future. You have acknowledged there is no place for me here, and there would be no place for me in Europe if I married you. Do you wonder that I came away to think, after Prince Hohenhauer--who, remember, knows me far better than you do--pointed out the inexorable truth? What would you do with me, Lee?" He stared out of the window in his turn--at the tender greens of the Park. He could hear the birds singing. Spring! The chill of winter was in the car, and it emanated from the woman beside him. "I don't know," he said miserably. "I only know that I love you and would take any chances."