He sat back against the trunk of the tree, facing out over the lake; she disposed herself cross-legged on the grass near by just within reaching distance.  She offered him her cigarette case but he declined.  Of late years, since his marriage to Paula, he had smoked very little.  As a substitute, now, he picked up a forked bit of branch, and began whittling it.

“I’m as much to blame as they are,” she said, presently.  “More, really.  Because, if I hadn’t procrastinated-o-ut of cowardice, mostly,—­until yesterday, when she was half-way over the edge, it might never have come to Maxfield Ware at all.  After the situation had dramatized itself like that, there was only one thing she could do.  Of course, they didn’t foresee that five years’ contract, any more than I did.”

He nodded assent, though rather absently to this.  “I’m not much interested in the abstract ethics of it,” he said.  “It’s disputable, of course, how far any one can be justified in making a major interference in another’s life; one that deprives him of the power of choice.  That’s what you have done to me—­the three of you.  If the premises are right, and the outcome prosperous, there’s something to be said for it.  But in this case ...”

“They aren’t mistaken, are they, dad?  Wallace and Mr. Whitney?—­Or Doctor Steinmetz?”

“Why, it’s reasonable to suppose that Whitney understands my financial condition better than I do.  I mean that.  It’s not a sneer.  But what he and Hood don’t allow for is that I’ve never tried to make money.  They’ve no idea what my earning power would be if I were to turn to and make that a prime consideration.  A year of it would take me out of the woods, I think.”

She waited, breathless, for him to deal with the third name.  She was pretty well at one with Paula in the relative valuation she put upon her father’s opinion and that of the throat and lung specialist.

“Oh, as for Steinmetz,” John Wollaston said, after a pause, querulously, “he’s a good observer.  There’s nothing to be said against him as a laboratory man.  But he has the vice of all German scientists; he doesn’t understand imponderables.  Never a flash of intuition about him.  He managed to intimidate Darby into agreeing with him.  Neither of them takes my recuperative powers into account.”

He seemed to feel that this wasn’t a very strong line to take and the next moment he conceded as much.

“But suppose they were right,” he flashed round at her.  “Am I not still entitled to my choice?  I’ve lived the greater part of my life.  I’ve pulled my weight in the boat.  It should be for me to choose whether I spend the life I have left in two years or in twenty.  If they want to call that suicide, let them.  I’ve no religion that’s real enough to make a valid argument against my right to extinguish myself if I choose.”

She wasn’t shocked.  It was characteristic of their talks together, this free range among ethical abstractions, especially on his part.