He had reached the self-conscious stage in youth when he looked upon himself as supernaturally old and tried in the furnace of experience. He quieted the dormant longings in his heart by assuring himself that he now took a different view of marriage, a more significant one as a grave social step. The less he felt the romance of their relations, the more he acknowledged the solid supplementary qualities which Doris would bring him as his companion, as associate and organizer of the home. That he could not give her all that she now poured out unreservedly to him, gave him at times a twinge of pity and compassion. She was so keen to progress, to broaden the outlook of her views, to be of real service to him. There were moments in her letters of inner revelations that stirred him almost with the guilty feeling of surprising what was not his to see. The idea of an early marriage would have been unbearable, yet as a possibility of the future it seemed to him an eminently wise and just procedure. At the Drake mansion his ring was answered by a caretaker, who came doubtfully to let him in, pausing to search for the electric buttons. In the anteroom and down the vistas of the salons, everything was bare and draped in dust-clothes; there was a feeling of abandonment and loneliness in the bared arches, as on his first visit a year before. "Bojo--is it you?" He heard her voice descending somewhere from the upper flights of the great stone stairway, and answered cheerily. The caretaker disappeared, satisfied, and he waited at the foot while she came rushing down and hung herself in his arms. "Why, Doris!" he exclaimed, surprised at her emotion and the tenseness of the figure that clung to him. "Doris, why, what's wrong?" "Wait, wait," she said breathlessly, burying her head on his shoulder and tightening the grip of her arms. She led him, still clinging to his side, through the ballroom and the little salon into the great library, where he had gone for his decisive interview with Drake. They stood a moment in filtered obscurity, groping for the buttons, until suddenly the room sprang out of the night. Then he saw that she had been weeping. Before he could exclaim, the tears sprang to her eyes and she flung herself in his arms again, sheltering her head against his shoulder, clinging to his protection as though reeling before the sudden down swoop of a storm. His first thought was of death, a catastrophe in the family--father, mother--Patsie! At this thought his heart seemed to stop and he said brokenly: "Doris, what is it--nothing has happened--no one is--is in danger?" "No, no," she said in a whisper. "Oh, don't make me speak--not just yet. Keep your arms about me. Tighter so that I can never, never get away."