How could her energetic nature have borne with his philosophy of hesitation, her imperative affirmation of life with his denial of effort, her unconquered optimism with his deeply rooted mistrust of happiness?
There was beauty in his face, in his ascetic and over-refined features, in his sympathetic smile and his cultured voice; but it was the beauty of resignation, of defeat nobly borne, of a spirit confirmed in the bitter sweetness of renouncement.

"It would make an old woman of me to marry him," she thought, "an old, patient, resigned woman." "Most things have slipped by me," he resumed presently, while they raced down a long hill toward the black pines and the fading red of the afterglow.

In a marshy pond near the roadside frogs were croaking, while from the darkening fields, encircled with webs of mist, there floated the mingled scents of freshly mown grass, of dewy flowers, of trodden weeds, of ploughed earth, of ancient mould--all the fugitive and immemorially suggestive odours of the country at twilight.

And at the touch of these scents, some unforgotten longing seemed to stir in her brain as if it had slept there, covered by clustering memories, from another lifetime.

She wanted something with an unbearable intensity; the vague and elusive yearning for happiness had become suddenly poignant and definite.