“You’re really rather conventional, at the bottom of your soul, aren’t you?” Clive remarked thoughtfully. “Of course I am. And so is everybody else. So are you, if you only knew it.” “Then,” said Clive, coolly, “why do you marry Rose-Ann? She isn’t. It you want a conventional wife and conventional married happiness, why don’t you marry some simple little country girl, and have a houseful of babies? Why—” There was a knock at the door. “That’s my other witness,” said Clive, and hurried into the hall. 2 While Clive and the newcomer talked for a moment in the hall, Felix stood frowning at the fire.... Clive, he felt, was becoming rather exasperating. Really, the unquestioning enthusiasm of Mrs. Cowan was preferable to such an inappropriately critical attitude as Clive’s. There was something deliberately malicious in it. That last remark about the “simple little country girl” was an attempt to shake his faith in this marriage. It was a damned mean trick!... And then he laughed at himself. For how could Clive possibly have guessed the effect of that remark? How could he know what a crazy fool he was talking to? “A simple country girl.” How could Clive know that there lurked in the back of Felix’s mind an absurd and impossible wish—a wish, long-forgotten, except in the most senseless of idle day-dreams, which these words of Clive’s made him remember, with an inexplicable pang! A wish for precisely what he ought never to have—. Marriage with the girl of that foolish day-dream would be, for such a person as himself, the most fantastic of tragedies: and it was doubtless its very impossibility that had made him conceive it as a romantic ideal. And that houseful of babies—for they too were a part of that foolish day-dream of his—why, that was madness. In actuality, he would have fled from the prospect of such a marriage. He really wanted—what he had so miraculously found in Rose-Ann: a companionship in the adventure and beauty of life.... And in an hour or two his choice would be confirmed—irrevocably. Marriage was just that—a definite decision among tangled and contradictory wishes.... He turned to face the girl whom Clive had led into the room. For an instant he was startled as by an apparition. Perhaps it was the effect of Clive’s words—this young woman seemed the very creature of his day-dreaming wish. Young, hardly more than nineteen, of slight but robust figure, with soft brown hair, dark quiet eyes and a serene mouth, she brought with her the fragrance of that fantasy which had only a moment ago disquieted him. She had a bundle in her arms, and for an instant the illusion was breathlessly complete—she was Rose-Ann’s phantom rival come to him in visible sweet flesh, bearing his baby at her bosom. “The bridegroom!” Clive was saying. “The witness!—Miss Phyllis Nelson, Mr. Felix Fay.” She smiled imperturbably and held out her hand, her eyes meeting his.