Ermentrude glanced up; the clock hung on her wall.

“Oh,” she murmured, “each hour it will speak to me of him and his words,” then softly, like one adream in Paradise: 

        “I love but thee,
   And thee will I love to eternity.”

Such was the event to her.  What was it to him?  Let us see: 

A hotel room—­a view of Pilatus, but with its top lost in enveloping clouds.

Seated before it with pen in hand above a sheet of paper, Carleton Roberts eyes these clouds but does not see them; he is hunting in his brain for words and they do not come.  Why?  His mother’s name is on the page and he has only to write that she has been quite correct in her judgment as to the unfitness of the marriage he had had in mind:—­that youth should mate with youth and that if she could see the glorious young girl whose acquaintance he had made here, she would be satisfied with his new choice which promised him the fullest happiness.  Why then a sheet yet blank and a hesitating hand, when all it had to do was to write?

Who can tell?  Man knows little of himself or of the conflicting passions which sway him this way or that, even when to the outward eye, and possibly to the inner one as well, action looks easy.

Did he feel, without its reaching the point of knowledge, that this mother of keenest expectation and highest hope would not be satisfied with what this charming but undeveloped girl of middle class parentage would bring him?  Or was there, deep down in his own undeveloped nature, a secret nerve alive to ambitions yet unnamed, to hopes not yet formulated, which warned him to think well before he spoke the irrevocable word linking a chain which, though twined with roses, was nevertheless a chain which nothing on earth should have power to break.

He never sounded his soul for an answer to this question; but when he rose, the paper was still blank.  The letter had not been written.

* * * * *

“I do not like secrecy.”

“Only for a little while, Ermentrude.  My mother is difficult.  I would prepare her.”

“And Uncle!”

“What of Uncle?”

“He made me take an oath to-day.”

“An oath?”

“That I would not leave him while he lived.”

“And you could do that?”

“I could do nothing else.  He’s a sick man, Carleton.  The doctors shake their heads when they leave him.  He will not live a year.”

“A year?  But that’s an eternity!  Can you wait, can I wait a year?”

“He loves me and I owe everything to him.  Next week we go to Nice.  These are days of parting for you and me, Carleton.”

Parting!  What word more cruel.  She saw that it shook him, and held her breath for his promise that she should not be long alone.  But it did not come.  He was taking time to think.  She hardly understood his doing this.  Surely, his mother must be very difficult and he a most considerate son.  She knew he loved her; perhaps never with a more controlling passion than at this moment of palpitating silence.