"You needn’t worry," flashed Gertrude. "I’ll remember those for you—when you need them. I meant," she explained, "about your trunk or railway tickets and so on. But anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’ll remind you of everything the day before." I promised to tie a knot in my handkerchief. "And may I ask," I ventured, "where we are going?" "I haven’t decided yet," Gertrude informed me. "I’ll let you know later, Ranny dear." There is something very wholesome and complete about Gertrude. That is the reason, I suppose, I have so long been fond of her. How she can put up with a dreamer like me is more than I can grasp. Without any picturesque or romantic significance to the phrase, I am a sort of beach comber, sunning myself in her cloudless energy on the indolent sands of life. Every one either tells me or implies that Gertrude is far too good for me. Nor do I doubt it. But I wish we could go on as we are without exposing her to the inconvenience of being married to me. But Gertrude knows best. "Won’t you stay and share my humble crust this evening?" I asked her as she rose to go. "No, thanks, Ranny," she smiled, somewhat enigmatically, I thought. "We shall often dine together—afterwards." "Of course," I agreed flippantly. "We may even meet at the races." "I promised," said Gertrude, "to dine at the Club with Stella Blackwelder—to settle some committee matters before I go away. Shall you be alone, poor thing?" "Yes—but that doesn’t matter. I am often alone. I prop up a book against a glass candlestick and the dinner is gone before I am aware of it." "It might as well be sawdust, for all you know," laughed Gertrude. "So it might," I told her, "except that Griselda can do better than sawdust. I might, of course," I added, "call up Dibdin and have him feast with me." "Your trampy friend," commented Gertrude. "Yes, better do it. I don’t like to think of you so much alone." "Now, that is very sweet of you, my dear. I’ll do exactly that." Her cool lips touched mine for an instant and she was gone. *CHAPTER II* To my shame I must record that, once I was alone, the appalling fact of marriage overwhelmed me like a landslide. With a sense of suffocation and wild struggle I longed to do in earnest what I had threatened to do in jest, to run away, blindly, madly, anywhere, to freedom, as far as ever I could go. When I should have been rejoicing, I desired, in a manner, to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. I thought upon Lincoln, a brave man if ever one there was, who had paled before the thought of marriage and wrote consoling letters to another in similar case. When I ought to have been feeling at my most virile, I felt unmanned.