“That’s how I felt, towards the last, in London, with nothing to do, nothing to think about, or plan, or live for. I got so I nearly screamed every time I faced the four dull walls of that hotel room. But, you see we have both fallen back on the wrong sort of stimulant. After all, what I wrote you in that letter _was_ true! Neither of us two should ever have been evil-doers. I am too—too much like other women, I suppose. And you’re too thin-skinned and introspective—too much of a twentieth century Hamlet. You should never have tapped a wire; and I should never have been a welcher and robbed MacNutt. You ought to have gone on being a nice, respectable young train-despatcher, with a row of geraniums in front of your station window; and I ought to be a prim little branch-office telegrapher in one of those big Broadway hotel corridors, in a little wire cage, between the news-stand and the cigar-counter. Then we should both have a lot still to look for and to live for.” She broke off inconsequently, and gazed out through the lightly-curtained window, to where a street piano was throbbing out the waltz-tune of _Stumbling_. “Do you remember our first days together?—the music and theatres and drives! Oh, what a happy four weeks they were!” And she gazed at him dreamily, as she hummed the tune of _Stumbling_ in her throaty, low-noted contralto, ending with a nonchalant little laugh, as she looked up and said, “But here’s our taxi, at last!” In the half-light of the taxi-cab, as they turned into Fifth Avenue, and swung up toward Central Park, she let her tired body rest against his shoulder, with her arm clinging to him forlornly. There was a minute or two of silence, and then putting her face up to him, she said, with a sudden passionate calmness: “Kiss me!” He felt the moist warmth of her capitulating lips, the clinging weight of her inert body, and, deep down within his own consciousness he knew that, if need be, he could die for her as the purest knight might have died for some old-world lady of spotless soul and name. Yet after all, he wondered, as he held her there, were they so irretrievably bad? Was it not only their game, this life they had drifted into?—their anodyne, their safeguard against exhausted desires and the corroding idleness of life? She must intuitively have felt what was running through his mind, as she slipped away from him, and drew back into her own corner of the taxi-cab, with a new look of brooding melancholy in her shadowy eyes. “If I were ignorant and coarse, and debased, then I could understand it. But I’m not! I have always wanted to be honest. From the first I have longed to be decent.” “You _are_ honest, through and through,” he protested. “You are as strong and true as steel.” She shook her head, but he caught her in his arms, and she lay there half-happy again. “Oh, Frank, for the twentieth time,” he pleaded, “won’t you marry me?”