"But I will not allow you to take the risk," Kathleen answered. "What sort of woman should I be to be willing again to live with a man I don't love? I have come to know that there are things one owes to _oneself_. Self-respect is one of them. I don't know how it has come to be so, but all my old feeling for you has _gone_. It is as though it had burnt itself out. I will not offer grey ashes to any man." Broomhurst looking up at her pale, set face, knew that her words were final, and turned his own aside with a groan. "Ah!" cried Kathleen with a little break in her voice, "_don't._ Go away and be happy and strong, and all that I loved in you. I am so sorry--so sorry to hurt you. I----" her voice faltered miserably. "I--I only bring trouble to people." There was a long pause. "Did you never think that there is a terrible vein of irony running through the ordering of this world?" she said presently. "It is a mistake to think our prayers are not answered--they are. In due time we get our heart's desire--when we have ceased to care for it." "I haven't yet got mine," Broomhurst answered doggedly, "and I shall never cease to care for it." She smiled a little with infinite sadness. "Listen, Kathleen," he said. They had both risen and he stood before her, looking down at her. "I will go now, but in a year's time I shall come back. I will not give you up. You shall love me yet." "Perhaps--I don't think so," she answered wearily. Broomhurst looked at her trembling lips a moment in silence, then he stooped and kissed both her hands instead. "I will wait till you tell me you love me," he said. She stood watching him out of sight. He did not look back, and she turned with swimming eyes to the grey sea and the transient gleams of sunlight that swept like tender smiles across its face. An Idyll By W. Brown MacDougal [Illustration: An Idyll] Reticence in Literature Some Roundabout Remarks By Hubert Crackanthorpe During the past fifty years, as everyone knows, the art of fiction has been expanding in a manner exceedingly remarkable, till it has grown to be the predominant branch of imaginative literature. But the other day we were assured that poetry only thrives in limited and exquisite editions; that the drama, here in England at least, has practically ceased to be literature at all. Each epoch instinctively chooses that literary vehicle which is best adapted for the expression of its particular temper: just as the drama flourished in the robust age of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; just as that outburst of lyrical poetry, at the beginning of the century in France, coincided with a period of extreme emotional exaltation; so the novel, facile and flexible in its conventions, with its endless opportunities for accurate delineation of reality, becomes supreme in a time of democracy and of science--to note but these two salient characteristics.