Fair started with astonishment, and the tears leaped again to her eyes as she laughed, and with new distress said: "It isn't--it--O Mr. Fair, don't you know what I mean? It doesn't make good poetry! As you would say, it's not good art. You may think me 'fresh,' as the girls say, and fantastical, but I can't help believing that in a matter like this there's something wrong--some essential wanting--in whatever's not good--good----" "Romance?" asked Fair; "do you think the fact that a thing is good romance----" "No! O no, no, no! I don't say being good romance is enough to commend it; but I do think not being good romance is enough to condemn it! Is that so very foolish?" The lover answered wistfully. "No. No." Then very softly: "Barbara "--he waited till she looked up--"if this thing should ever seem to you to have become good poetry, might not your answer be different?" Barbara hesitated. "I--you--O--I only know how it seems now!" "Never mind," said Fair, very gently. They rose and he took her hand, speaking again in the same tone. "You really believe I have the right to wait for a later answer?" Her head drooped. "The right?" she murmured, "yes--the right----" "So also do I. I shall wait. Good-by." She raised her glance, her voice failed to a whisper. "Good-by." Gaze to gaze, one stood, and the other, with reluctant step, backed away; and at the last moment, with his foot leaving the threshold, lover and maiden said again, still gaze to gaze: "Good-by." "Good-by." LXXIV. COMPLETE COLLAPSE OF A PERFECT UNDERSTANDING The door closed and Barbara noiselessly mounted the stairs. At its top an elm-shaded window allowed a view of some fifty yards or more down the street, and as she reached it now the pleasantness of the outer day furnished impulse enough, if there had been no other, for her to glance out. She stopped sharply, with her eyes fixed where they had fallen. For there stood John March and Henry Fair in the first bright elation of their encounter busily exchanging their manly acknowledgments and explanations. Lost to herself she stayed, an arm bent high and a knuckle at her parted teeth, comparing the two men and noting the matchless bearing of her Southerner. In it she read again for the hundredth time all the energy and intrepidity which in her knowledge it stood for; his boyish openness and simplicity, his tender belief in his mother, his high-hearted devotion to the fulfilment of his father's aspirations, and the impetuous force and native skill with which at mortal risks and in so short a time he had ranked himself among the masters of public fortune. She recalled, as she was prone to do, what Charlie Champion had once meditatively said to her on seeing him approach: "Here comes the only man in Dixie Jeff-Jack Ravenel's afraid of."