She laughed.

“Everything fixed up for them, same as it is for the husbands, eh?  Nobody meddles or makes trouble if you know the ropes?”

“No, nobody ... it’s all quite easy....”  She stopped, her faint smile checked, as his backward movement made her hands drop from his shoulders.

“And that’s what you’re proposing to me?  That you and I should do like the rest of ’em?” His face had lost its comic roundness and grown harsh and dark, as it had when her father had taken her away from him at Opake.  He turned on his heel, walked the length of the room and halted with his back to her in the embrasure of the window.  There he paused a full minute, his hands in his pockets, staring out at the perpetual interweaving of motors in the luminous setting of the square.  Then he turned and spoke from where he stood.

“Look here.  Undine, if I’m to have you again I don’t want to have you that way.  That time out in Apex, when everybody in the place was against me, and I was down and out, you stood up to them and stuck by me.  Remember that walk down Main Street?  Don’t I!—­and the way the people glared and hurried by; and how you kept on alongside of me, talking and laughing, and looking your Sunday best.  When Abner Spragg came out to Opake after us and pulled you back I was pretty sore at your deserting; but I came to see it was natural enough.  You were only a spoilt girl, used to having everything you wanted; and I couldn’t give you a thing then, and the folks you’d been taught to believe in all told you I never would.  Well, I did look like a back number, and no blame to you for thinking so.  I used to say it to myself over and over again, laying awake nights and totting up my mistakes ... and then there were days when the wind set another way, and I knew I’d pull it off yet, and I thought you might have held on....”  He stopped, his head a little lowered, his concentrated gaze on her flushed face.  “Well, anyhow,” he broke out, “you were my wife once, and you were my wife first—­and if you want to come back you’ve got to come that way:  not slink through the back way when there’s no one watching, but walk in by the front door, with your head up, and your Main Street look.”

Since the days when he had poured out to her his great fortune-building projects she had never heard him make so long a speech; and her heart, as she listened, beat with a new joy and terror.  It seemed to her that the great moment of her life had come at last—­the moment all her minor failures and successes had been building up with blind indefatigable hands.

“Elmer—­Elmer—­” she sobbed out.

She expected to find herself in his arms, shut in and shielded from all her troubles; but he stood his ground across the room, immovable.

“Is it yes?”

She faltered the word after him:  “Yes—?”

“Are you going to marry me?”

She stared, bewildered.  “Why, Elmer—­marry you?  You forget!”