“I don’t care,” she repeated.  “I’m proud to be your friend.  I’d do anything for you.  I’m made that way, I guess.”

Martin sat up.  He took her hand in his.  He did it deliberately, with warmth but without passion; and such warmth chilled her.

“Don’t let’s talk about it,” she said.

“You are a great and noble woman,” he said.  “And it is I who should be proud to know you.  And I am, I am.  You are a ray of light to me in a very dark world, and I’ve got to be straight with you, just as straight as you have been.”

“I don’t care whether you’re straight with me or not.  You could do anything with me.  You could throw me in the dirt an’ walk on me.  An’ you’re the only man in the world that can,” she added with a defiant flash.  “I ain’t taken care of myself ever since I was a kid for nothin’.”

“And it’s just because of that that I’m not going to,” he said gently.  “You are so big and generous that you challenge me to equal generousness.  I’m not marrying, and I’m not—­well, loving without marrying, though I’ve done my share of that in the past.  I’m sorry I came here to-day and met you.  But it can’t be helped now, and I never expected it would turn out this way.”

“But look here, Lizzie.  I can’t begin to tell you how much I like you.  I do more than like you.  I admire and respect you.  You are magnificent, and you are magnificently good.  But what’s the use of words?  Yet there’s something I’d like to do.  You’ve had a hard life; let me make it easy for you.” (A joyous light welled into her eyes, then faded out again.) “I’m pretty sure of getting hold of some money soon—­lots of it.”

In that moment he abandoned the idea of the valley and the bay, the grass-walled castle and the trim, white schooner.  After all, what did it matter?  He could go away, as he had done so often, before the mast, on any ship bound anywhere.

“I’d like to turn it over to you.  There must be something you want—­to go to school or business college.  You might like to study and be a stenographer.  I could fix it for you.  Or maybe your father and mother are living—­I could set them up in a grocery store or something.  Anything you want, just name it, and I can fix it for you.”

She made no reply, but sat, gazing straight before her, dry-eyed and motionless, but with an ache in the throat which Martin divined so strongly that it made his own throat ache.  He regretted that he had spoken.  It seemed so tawdry what he had offered her—­mere money—­compared with what she offered him.  He offered her an extraneous thing with which he could part without a pang, while she offered him herself, along with disgrace and shame, and sin, and all her hopes of heaven.

“Don’t let’s talk about it,” she said with a catch in her voice that she changed to a cough.  She stood up.  “Come on, let’s go home.  I’m all tired out.”