Scarcely had she reached her home that afternoon when a messenger boy appeared with a great armful of roses and, as she arranged the flowers on her table, burying her flushed face again and again in their fragrant coolness, she had told herself that to-morrow, when he asked her to cross with him the threshold of that old, old door, she would answer: yes. But, even as she so resolved, she had been conscious of something in her heart that denied the resolution of her mind. And so it was that, as she sat alone before her fire that night, she knew that she was face to face with a crisis in her life. So it was that she had come to the testing time and knew that she must win or lose alone. In the sacred privacy of her room, with the perfume of his roses filling the air and the certainty that when he came on the morrow she must answer, she looked into the future to see, if she might, what it held for her and for him if she should cross with him the threshold of that old, old, door. He was a man whose love would honor any woman--this she knew. And he was a man of power and influence in the world--a man who could provide for his mate a home of which any woman would be proud to be the mistress. Nor could she doubt his love for nothing else could have persuaded such a man to ask of a woman that which he was coming to ask of her. Beginning with her answer on the following evening the woman traced, in thought, all that would follow. She saw herself leaving the life that she had never desired because it could not recognize her womanhood and, in fancy, received the congratulations of her friends. She lived, in her imagination, those busy days when she would be making ready for the day that was to come. Very clearly, she pictured to herself the wedding; it would be a quiet wedding, she told herself, but as beautiful and complete as cultured taste and wealth could make it. Then they would go away, for a time, to those cities and lands beyond the sea that, all her life, she had longed to visit. When they returned, it would be to that beautiful old home of his family--the home that she had so often, in passing, admired; and in that home, so long occupied by him alone, she would be the proud mistress. And then--then--would come her children--their children--and so all the fulfillment of her womanhood's dreams.