“Dickie,” she faltered, and stood against the door, drooping wearily, “what are you doing here at this hour?”

“What does the hour matter?” he asked impatiently.  “Come over to the window.  I want you to look at this big star.  I’ve been watching it.  It’s almost gone.  It’s like a white bird flying straight into the sun.”

He was imperative, laid his cool hand upon hers and drew her to the window.  They stood facing the sunrise.

“Why did you come here?” again asked Sheila.  The beauty of the sky only deepened her misery and shame.

“Because I couldn’t wait any longer than one night.  It’s sure been an awful long night for me, Sheila ...  Sheila—­” He drew the hand he still held close to him with a trembling touch and laid his other hand over it.  Then she felt the terrible beating of his heart, felt that he was shaking.  “Sheila, I love you.”  She had hidden her face against the curtain, had turned from him.  She felt nothing but weariness and shame.  She was like a leaden weight tied coldly to his throbbing youth.  Her hand under his was hot and lifeless like a scorched rose.  “I want you to come away with me from Millings.  You can’t keep on a-working in that saloon.  You can’t a-bear to have folks saying and thinking the fool things they do.  And I can’t a-bear it even if you can.  I’d go loco, and kill.  Sheila, I’ve been thinking all night, just sitting on the edge of my bed and thinking.  Sheila, if you will marry me, I will promise you to take care of you.  I won’t let you suffer any.  I will die”—­his voice rocked on the word, spoken with an awful sincerity of young love—­“before I let you suffer any.  If you could love me a little bit”—­he stopped as though that leaping heart had sprung up into his throat—­“only a little bit, Sheila,” he whispered, “maybe—?”

“I can’t,” she said.  “I can’t love you that way even a little bit.  I can’t marry you, Dickie.  I wish I could.  I am so tired.”

She drew her hand away, or rather it fell from the slackening grasp of his, and hung at her side.  She looked up from the curtain to his face.  It was still alight and tender and pale.

“You’re real sure, Sheila, that you never could?—­that you’d rather go on with this—?”

She pressed all the curves and the color out of her lips, still looking at him, and nodded her head.

“I can’t stay in Millings,” Dickie said, “and work in Poppa’s hotel and watch this, Sheila—­unless, some way, I can help you.”

“Then you’d better go,” she said lifelessly, “because I can’t see what else there is for me to do.  Oh, I shan’t go on with it for very long, of course—­”

He came an eager half-step nearer.  “Then, anyway, you’ll let me go away and work, and when I’ve kind of got a start, you’ll let me come back and—­and see if—­if you feel any sort of—­different from what you do now?  It wouldn’t be so awful long.  I’d work like—­like Hell!” His thin hand shot into a fist.