He created wants in order to gratify them later.  He suggested her need of things which he had already ordered, which, before she had been enticed into expressing a wish for them, were then speeding across the Continent toward her.  Every hour brought her some fresh and ingenuous sign of his thought and of his devotion.  He treated these tributes as a matter of course; if she failed to observe them and to see his handiwork in them he let them fall to the ground unnoticed.

His love itself was his argument-in-chief; it was its own excuse; it needed no allies; “I love you” was his first and last word.  It puzzled her to find that she could not care.  When she was alone she asked herself what there was in him of which she disapproved, and she could only answer that there was nothing.  She asked herself what other men there were who pleased her more, and she could think of none.  On the contrary, she found him entirely charming as a friend—­ but his love distressed her greatly.  It was a foreign language; she could not comprehend it.  When he allowed it to appear it completely disguised him in her eyes; it annoyed her so much that at times she considered herself a much ill-used young person.

It was in this way that the matter stood between them when their long journey was ended and they reached London.  He was miserable, desperate, and hopeless; the girl was firm in that she would not marry him, and her mother, who respected both the depth of Corbin’s feelings and her daughter’s reticence, and who had watched the struggle with a troubled heart, was only thankful that they were to part, and that it was at an end.  Corbin had no idea where he would go nor what he would do.  He recognized that to cross the ocean with them would only subject his love to fresh distress and humiliation, and he had determined to put as much space between him and Miss Warriner as the surface of the globe permitted.  The Philippines seemed to offer a picturesque retreat for a broken life.  He decided he would go there and enlist and have himself shot.  He was uncertain whether he would follow in the steps of his Revolutionary ancestors and join the men who were struggling for their liberty and independence, or his fellow-Americans; but that he would get shot by one side or the other he was determined.  And then in days to come she would think, perhaps, of the young man on the other side of the globe, buried in the wet rice-fields, with the palms fanning him through his eternal sleep, and she might be sorry then that she had not listened to his troubled heart.  The picture gave him some small comfort, and that night when he ordered dinner for them at the Savoy his manner showed the inspired resolve of one who is soon to mount the scaffold unafraid, and with a rose between his lips.