ones it had to be sustained as a success, and it seemed to Rose that
civilized beings could love, and live in the knowledge of their love,
without injuring some one already cruelly unfortunate.

But, as the months went by, she found she had to reckon with two
difficult people, or rather with two people, ordinary in themselves,
cast by fate into a difficult situation. There was Christabel, with
her countless idle hours in which to formulate theories, to lay traps,
to realize that the devotion of Francis became less obvious; and there
was Francis, breaking the spirit of their contract with his looks, and
sometimes the letter, with his complaints and pleadings.

He could not go on like this for ever, he said. He saw her once a week
for a few minutes, if he was lucky: how could she expect him to be
satisfied with that? It was little enough, she owned, but more than it
might have been. She could never make him admit, perhaps because he
did not feel, how greatly they were blessed; but she saw herself as
the guardian of a temple: she stood in the doorway forbidding him to
enter less the place should be defiled, yet forbidding him in such a
way that he should not love her less. Yet constantly saying 'No,'
constantly shaking the head and smiling propitiatingly the while is
not to appease; and those short hours of companionship in which they
had once managed to be happy became times of strain, of
disappointment, of barely kept control.

'I wish I could stop loving you,' he broke out one day, 'but I can't.
You're the kind one doesn't forget. I thought I'd done it once, for a
few months, but you came back--you, came back.'

She smiled, seeming aloof and full of some wisdom unknown to him. She