He studied her upturned face. In it he imagined he could see all the old opposition of the dual and strangely contending nature. About the shadowy eyes seemed to lurk the weariness and the rebelliousness of the inwardly pure woman who had been driven to face life in its more dubious phases, the woman who had broken laws and essayed great hazards with him. Yet about the fresh young mouth remained all the pride and virginal purity of the woman whose inward life was till virginal and pure. In this, he felt, lay the bitterest thing of all. She was still a good woman, but the memory of how, through the dark and devious ways of the career that seemed to have engulfed her, she had fought and struggled for that almost incongruous purity of mind and body, remained to him a tragic and autumnal emblem of what her unknown earlier, April-like goodness of girlish soul must have been. He sighed as he thought of it, before he began to speak again, for it gave him the haunting impression that he had been cheated out of something; that the beauty and rapture of that Aprilian girlhood should have been his, and yet had eluded him. “Even though there had been another,” he went on quietly, “I don’t believe it would count. Isn’t it strange how we all beat and flutter and break our wings around a beautiful face! One face, just a little softer, one woman’s eyes, just a little deeper, and one voice, a little mellower; and dear me, dear me—how this wayward mortal passion of ours throbs and beats and surges about it! One beautiful face, and it sends world-history all awry, and brings out armies and changes maps, and makes men happy or miserable, as it likes!” “That’s the first time I ever knew you were a poet!” she cried in almost a coo of pride. His hand lay heavily on her crown of tumbled gold hair. “Won’t you marry me?” he asked again, as quietly as before. “Oh, Jim,” she cried, “I’m afraid of it! I’m afraid of myself, and of you!” “But see what we’ve been through together—the heights and the depths. And we never hated each other, there!” “But there were times, I know there were times when you might have, if you were tied to me! We were each free to go and come. But it’s not that, Jim, I’m so afraid of. It’s the keeping on at what we have been doing, the danger of not keeping decent, of getting our thoughts and feelings deadened, of getting our hearts macadamized. That’s why I could never marry you until we are both honest once more!” “But if I do try to get decent—I can’t promise to turn angel all at once, you know!—if I _do_ try to be decent, then will you marry me, and help me along?” “I don’t look for miracles,—neither of us can be all good, anyway; it’s the trying to be good!” “But we _have_ tried—so often!” “Who was it said that the Saints were only the sinners who kept on trying?” “Wasn’t there a bishop in your family?” he asked, with a quizzical little upthrust of his mouth corners. “A bishop?” she asked, all gravity.