“If Deane and I,” he answered, “can also convince ourselves of this, I shall act.  You need not be afraid of that.”

“Deane and you!” she repeated, contemptuously.  “Who am I, then, in your counsels?  Just a puppet, I suppose?  Anyhow, it was I who ran the risk, I who gave these men into your hands.  If you play the poltroon, everything is over between us, Norris.”

He raised his eyes and looked at her in half-unwilling admiration.  She and their hostess had come out on to the roof, just as the two men had been in the act of descending.  A telephone call a few moments later had summoned Deane away, and his wife, who found the air a little chilly, had accompanied him.  Stella was standing with her head thrown back, her figure tall and splendid in her evening gown of white satin, thrown into vivid relief against the background of empty air.  She was angry, and the pose suited her.  The slight hardness of her expression was lost in the dim blue twilight which still waited for the moon.  Vine, an unemotional man, felt with a curious strength the charm of this isolation on the housetop, this tranquillity, so much more suggestive of solitude than anything which could be realized within the walls of a room.  He shivered a little when he saw how close she was to the low parapet, and he held out his hand.  She took it at once, and her face softened.

“Dear Norris,” she said, “forgive me if I am disagreeable, but think what I went through to get that paper.  Think how I have hoped that it might mean everything to you, perhaps to us.”

She faltered, and it was in his mind then to speak the words which she had waited so long to hear from him, and yet he hesitated.  He was a man who loved his freedom, not perhaps in the ordinary sense of the word, but he had still an almost passionate objection to lessening in any degree his individual hold upon life, to giving any one else a permanent right to share its struggles and its ambitions.  He owed it to her, he was very sure of that, and yet he hesitated.  She bent towards him.  Perhaps she too felt that the moment was one not likely to be let go.

“Norris,” she said, “don’t listen to Deane or any of them.  Strike your blow.  Your paper will become famous.  Trust to that for your reward if you will.  If not a child, you could use your knowledge of what will happen on the morning of its appearance to make a fortune.  Do you know I have grown to hate those men?  If my father goes too, I do not care.  I owe him very little, and I have had enough of luxury.  There is more to be got out of a cottage in Italy or Switzerland, or even in England here, than a mansion in our country.  I wish I could convert you.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“It is different with us,” he said.  “A man must be where life is.  I do not think that I could ever be content with idleness.”

“And yet when it comes,” she reminded him, “you love it.  Who was it who spent a year in some little village near the Carpathians, and had almost to be dragged back to civilization?  Norris, sometimes I think that you are a poseur.”