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you used to have—that you ought not to marry me——"

Yvonne pulled herself away from him and stood, cool and contemptuous, at a little distance. "'Ought not'!" she mocked. "Stupid words! I use them now and then, but never in my life have they prevented me from taking anything I really wanted." She concluded, thoughtfully, "For instance: I suppose there are people who would say that I 'ought not' to go back to Parke Demorest. Nevertheless I'm going back to him—tomorrow."

There was an age-long interval while their glances clashed, fire against frigidity. Then Jock turned . . . swooped up his coat . . . and went.

Yvonne sank to her knees and huddled there on the carpet, a little shuddering heap of silk and feathers.

For months he honestly believed that he would never be happy again.

So perverse is human nature that when something we have long possessed is taken from us, we do not try to determine whether or not, in our hearts, we still valued it. Theft is theft, even though it removes the thing with which we would have parted voluntarily in a little while. Jock regarded himself as a man who had suffered irredeemable loss; and not until much later did he come to the realization that he had ceased to require what he lost before he lost it.

In the meantime, he was very melancholy, and very sure that without Yvonne nothing under heavens could ever be the same. The first sharp throes of anguish