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DON-A-DREAMS

in its prides that it might have made a queen worthy of her throne. She looked out, with wet eyes, on the street of theatre crowds which had suddenly, at the turn of a corner, confronted them with its hansom cabs and its café lights and its midnight gaiety; and she felt herself uplifted above it, beside him, in the isolation of a companionship so intensely realized that for a bewildering moment he seemed not a separate person but a part of her. Then she drooped her head, like a woman returning from an altar-rail where she has received the eucharist; for she had indeed, in that moment, partaken of the sacrament of love, and she felt her emotion glowing through her like a holy spirit. In that moment the great miracle of the young heart had wrought its almost divine change in her. From that moment, she was no longer a soul free in the midst of its fellows; she had surrendered herself to the need of the man beside her, and, through him, to the great fraternity of human suffering and the office of bearing into the still unseeded future the wonder and agony of human life.

He felt the quivering of her hand on his arm. "Are you cold?"

"No," she said gently. "Don't worry—about me."


She accompanied him, thereafter, in a silence which gave him no hint of her thoughts; and supposing that she was silent because she was despondent, he tried to encourage her with his usual assurances that everything would "come out right," that they would begin their campaign "really" in the morning, that he had done wrong