Ainslee's Magazine, February 1913 — page 98: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

88 failure? And, for the rest, I want nothing more of life myself. I have proved that happiness is not for me. But, hand in hand with this dreaming boy, 1s 1t not possible But Olaf Nilsson’s eyes were full of pain—haggard and tragic in his young, white face. It dawned slowly and strangely on Pippa that he was less ut- terly and weakly a boy than she had thought. A man’s renunciation was struggling with his young, warm ardor. “T cannot take your sacrifice!” he cried painfully. “You are offering me too much.” Pippa shook her head. There was a curious bitterness in her voice as she answered: “No! I am only offering you—myself.”” Olaf Nilsson did not understand. “It is—too much,” ~he muttered huskily. “No,” said Mrs. Carpenter quietly, “it is not too mu¢eh. It is all that I have to give, but that is not—too much. It is quite possible that it is not enough.” The boy looked as if he could have knelt. His blue eyes were wide and re- mote with their passion of dreams. “Most Beautiful,’ he whispered, “I shall not forget! I shall never forget. And yet—I cannot take your sacrifice. Poverty has made me a poor thing, but not so poor as that!” Pippa, with a strange and wonder- ful pang, realized that he did not know at all the quality of her sacrifice. To him it was no mess of pottage that she was giving up, but an exquisite birth- right. “You—so high and so perfect,” the young voice went on brokenly, incoher- ently—‘“‘to stoop to me!. Dear one, what have I done to deserve so much? But you were made to walk on flowers and wear white velvet—do you dream that I would let you come to me—here?”’ “T have come to you,” she said, very gently. Olaf Nilsson went to her and bent above her hands, kissing first one and then the other reverently, as if they were holy things. “Yes, you sweet lady,” he whispered, “you have come tome! God thank you AINSLEE’S for it, for have no words. But—I will not take you. I will send you away. Do you hear? I, who love you, who adore you, will send ‘you out of my life.” “Forever?” she said quietly. She knew the potency of the word. Olaf hesitated, and pain drew his face into fine, hard lines. “Not forever,” he breathed, and a light came into his eyes—‘“only until I have won success.” Pippa smiled a little scornfully. “Is it possible,’ she said, “that you want to wait, like a shipping clerk or a brew- er’s man, until you can support me?” “Dear ” he broke in, but she went on, in the same soft, disdainful tone: “T came to offer you dreams—and what you want is a bank account! I came to share my heart with you, and you are only thinking of sharing a fur- nished flat with me!” But Olaf Nilsson shook his head. “Lovely Beloved,” he said quaintly, “you know better than that.” And so they stood, facing one an- other, each amazed by the ideals and the nobility of the other—closer, as a mat- ter of fact, to true affinity. than ever before. So do our moments of bodily parting become most truly moments of spiritual meeting. It is a paradox as old as love and life. ‘Some day,’ he said softly, “I will conquer the world and bring it to you, and lay it at your dear feet—some day!” “Some day?” echoed the woman, and the twist of her lips was of irony as well as of pain. “Some day I shall be old, Olaf Nilsson!” He laughed at the thought. There was, indeed, something ageless and im- mortal about Pippa Carpenter. [For fifteen years, time—as women recog- nize time, the time of fading lips, sil- vering hair, deepening lines—had stood still for her, dispassionately, not kindly, but like one indifferent to her. Yet “some day” sounded sinister and chill. She had a sting of revolt as she stared at the boy’s beautiful face in the flick- ering candlelight. He was better and (C@ AMUC IOOK (F@)