"Any price, for just that!" he said grimly. "No, no! You would not. Don't say that! I so much want you to be bigger than that." "The woman you see in your mirror would be cheap at any cost." "But a man even like yourself. Sir, would be very cheap, if his price was such as you say. No turncoat could win me--I'd love him more on his own side yonder threefold wall, _with_ his convictions, than on my side without them. I couldn't be bought cheap as that, nor by a cheap man. I'd never love a man who held himself cheap. "But then," she added, casting back at him one of his own earlier speeches, "if you only thought as I did, what could not we two do together--for the cause of those human blades of grass--so soon cut down? Ah, life is so little, so short!" "No! No! Stop!" he cried out. "Ah, now is the torture--now you turn the wheel. I can not recant! I can not give up my convictions, or my love, either one; and yet--I'm not sure I'm going to have left either one. It's hell, that's what's left for me. But listen! What for those that grow as flowers, tall, beautiful, there among the grass that is cut down--should they perish from the earth? For what were such as they made, tall and beautiful?--poppies, mystic, drug-like, delirium producing? Is that it--is that your purpose in life, then, after all? You--what you see in your mirror there--is it the purpose of _that_ being--so beautiful, so beautiful--to waste itself, all through life, over some vague and abstract thing out of which no good can come? Is that all? My God! Much as I love you, I'd rather see you marry some other man than think of you never married at all. God never meant a flower such as you to wither, to die, to be _wasted_. Why, look at you! Look . . . at . . . you! And you say you are to be wasted! God never meant it so, you beauty, you wonderful woman!" Even as she was about to speak, drawn by the passion of him, the agony of his cry, there came to the ears of both an arresting sound--one which it seemed to Josephine was not wholly strange to her ears. It was like the cry of a babe, a child's wail, difficult to locate, indefinite in distance. "What was it?" she whispered. "Did you hear?" He made no answer, except to walk to her straight and take her by the arms, looking sadly, mournfully into her face. "Ah, my God! My God! Have I not heard? What else have I heard, these years? And you're big enough not to ask-- "It can't endure this way," said he, after a time at last. "You must go. Once in a while I forget. It's got to be good-by between you and me. We'll set to-morrow morning as the time for you to go. "As I have a witness," he said at last, "I've paid. Good-by!"