"Not to-night," with a tenderness that startled one, coming from lips so thin and critical. "You are not well. You have some hard pain there, and you want to make it real. Let it sleep. You were watching for me. Let me have just that silly thought to take with me. Look up, Theodora. I want the hot color on your cheek again, and the look in your eye I saw there once,--only once. Do you remember?" "I remember,"--her face crimson, her eyes flashing with tears. "Douglas, Douglas, never speak of that to me! I dare not think of it. Let me tell you what I want to say. It will soon be over." "I will not, Theodora," he said, coolly. "See now, child! You are not your healthy self to-night. You have been too much alone. This solitude down there in your heart is eating itself out in some morbid whim. I saw it in your eye. Better it had forced itself into anger, as usual." She did not speak. He took her hand and seated her beside him, talked to her in the same careless, gentle way, watching her keenly. "Did you ever know the meaning of your name? I think of it often,--_The gift of God,--Theodora_. Surely, if there be such an all-embracing Good, He has no more helpful gift than a woman such as you might be." She looked up, smiling. "Might be? That is not"---- "Lover-like? No. Yet, Dode, I think sometimes Eve might have been such a one as you,--the germ of all life. Think how you loathe death, inaction, pain; the very stem you thrust into earth catches vitality from your fingers, and grows, as for no one else." She knew, through all, that, though his light words were spoken to soothe her, they masked a strength of feeling that she dared not palter with, a something that would die out of his nature when his faith in her died, never to live again. "Eve fell," she said. "So would you, alone. You are falling now, morbid, irritable. Wait until you come into the sunshine. Why, Theodora, you will not know yourself, the broad, warm, unopened nature." His voice faltered; he stooped nearer to her, drew her hand into his own. "There will be some June days in our lives, little one, for you and me,"--his tone husky, broken,--"when this blood-work is off my hand, when I can take you. My years have been hard, bare. You know, child. You know how my body and brain have been worn out for others. I am free now. When the war is over, I will conquer a new world for you and me." She tried to draw away from him. "I need no more. I am contented. For the future,--God has it, Douglas." "But my hand is on it!" he said, his eye growing hard. "And you are mine, Theodora!" He put his hand on her head: he never had touched her before this evening: he stroked back her hair with an unsteady touch, but as if it and she belonged to him, inalienable, secure. The hot blood flushed into her cheeks, resentful. He smiled quietly. "You will bring life to me," he whispered. "And I will bleach out this anger, these morbid shadows of the lonesome days,--sun them out with--love."