“What is it you are giving up?” demanded Rosemary, facing Dick earnestly in the taxi.

“Nothing of importance.”

“Are you a scientist?”

“I’m a doctor of medicine.”

“Oh-h!” she smiled delightedly. “My father was a doctor too. Then why don’t you —” she stopped.

“There’s no mystery. I didn’t disgrace myself at the height of my career, and hide away on the Riviera. I’m just not practising. You can’t tell, I’ll probably practise again some day.”

Rosemary put up her face quietly to be kissed. He looked at her for a moment as if he didn’t understand. Then holding her in the hollow of his arm he rubbed his cheek against her cheek’s softness, and then looked down at her for another long moment.

“Such a lovely child,” he said gravely.

She smiled up at him; her hands playing conventionally with the lapels of his coat. “I’m in love with you and Nicole. Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are. Honestly — I love you and Nicole — I do.”

— So many times he had heard this — even the formula was the same.

Suddenly she came toward him, her youth vanishing as she passed inside the focus of his eyes and he had kissed her breathlessly as if she were any age at all. Then she lay back against his arm and sighed.

“I’ve decided to give you up,” she said.

Dick started — had he said anything to imply that she possessed any part of him?

“But that’s very mean,” he managed to say lightly, “just when I was getting interested.”

“I’ve loved you so —” As if it had been for years. She was weeping a little now. “I’ve loved you so-o-o.”

Then he should have laughed, but he heard himself saying, “Not only are you beautiful but you are somehow on the grand scale. Everything you do, like pretending to be in love or pretending to be shy gets across.”

In the dark cave of the taxi, fragrant with the perfume Rosemary had bought with Nicole, she came close again, clinging to him. He kissed her without enjoying it. He knew that there was passion there, but there was no shadow of it in her eyes or on her mouth; there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She clung nearer desperately and once more he kissed her and was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, by the glance that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world. She did not know yet that splendor is something in the heart; at the moment when she realized that and melted into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret.

Her room in the hotel was diagonally across from theirs and nearer the elevator. When they reached the door she said suddenly:

“I know you don’t love me — I don’t expect it. But you said I should have told you about my birthday. Well, I did, and now for my birthday present I want you to come into my room a minute while I tell you something. Just one minute.”

They went in and he closed the door, and Rosemary stood close to him, not touching him. The night had drawn the color from her face — she was pale as pale now, she was a white carnation left after a dance.

“When you smile —” He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole’s silent proximity, “I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby teeth.”

But he was too late — she came close up against him with a forlorn whisper.

“Take me.”

“Take you where?”

Astonishment froze him rigid.

“Go on,” she whispered. “Oh, please go on, whatever they do. I don’t care if I don’t like it — I never ex............