It filled him with anger to think of this child whom sorrow had no right to touch for years—to think of her life as clouded at the moment when it should have been filled with joys. It was unfair.... Life had no right to treat her so. Sympathy and tenderness moved him, and he placed his arm about her and drew her to him. She did not resist, nor did she respond, even when he turned her face upward and kissed her. Her lips were cold.... If nothing but little minutes of happiness were possible for her, he vowed in his heart that he would make them more numerous. He continued to hold her, and she lay in his arms unresisting while he whispered to her as he would have whispered to an unhappy child—yet not as he would have whispered to a child. The touch of her, her nearness, her sweet fragility mounted to his head. “I want you to be very happy ... because I love you,” he said, and, saying it, he believed it. There was room in his thoughts for nothing but her in that moment. Inhibitions were forgotten, apprehensions laid aside—the youth in his heart cried out to the youth in her heart—nothing remained but youth and love and a great sympathy. He did not look to the future. The sharp voice of conscience, suspicious, narrow, inherited from his mother, was silenced. Not that he was consciously running counter to the demands of that conscience! He was living that minute with no thought of what the next minute might bring.... Andree freed herself and looked at him gravely, with a sad scrutiny. “No,” she said. “You do not love me.... It is not possible.” “But I do.... I do.... Don’t you love me a little—just a little?” “Oh,” she said in a little voice, “I am afraid....” “Afraid? ... Of what?” “I do not know.... I am so _solitaire_—so lonely—and I am afraid.” “If you love me—” “_Non!... Non!..._ You do not love me. You only say. And if I love you—in a week, in two week, you go away to _Amérique_ and leave me to be more _solitaire_.... I should be more sad....” “No,” he declared, and was about to expostulate and to declare that he would never leave her, but the words would not come. His mother had stepped in. “You will love me,” he declared, in spite of his mother. “We will love each other—and there will be happiness.... If the best we can have is little moments of happiness, let us have all we can of them.” He was honest, thought he was being honest in his sophistry. “You would go away—in a week, in a month....” “No, no!” He saw that she was crying, and suddenly she turned from him to bury her face in her arms and to sob quietly, not unrestrainedly, but with such a quietness as went with powerful impulse to his heart, and he gathered her to him again and tried to comfort her. “Why do you cry? What is it, _mignonne_?” She shook her head. “I do not know,” she said, but he knew that she did know and would not tell. “I will go home now.... I am sad, and you will not like me when I am sad.”