“I asked that question, put it that way, thinking perhaps I understood and that I could make it easier for you to tell me.”  He broke off, there, for an instant to get his voice under control.  Then he asked, steadily, “Are you going to marry Graham Stannard?”

She gasped again, but when he looked up at her there was nothing in her face but an incredulous astonishment.

So there was one alternative shorn away; one that he had not conceived as more than a very faint possibility.  It was not into matrimony that her long journey was to take her.  He pulled himself up with a jerk to answer—­and it must be done smoothly and comfortably—­the question she had just asked him.  How in the world had he ever come to think of a thing like that?

“Why, it was in the air at Hickory Hill those days before you came.  And then Sylvia was explicit about it, as something every one was hoping for.”

“Was that why you went away?” she asked with an intent look into his face.  “Because he had a—­prior claim, and it wouldn’t be fair to—­poach upon his preserves?”

He gave an ironic monosyllable laugh.  “I tried, for the next few days to bamboozle myself into adopting that explanation but I couldn’t.  The truth was, of course, that I ran away simply because I was frightened.  Sheer panic terror of the thing that had taken hold of me.  The thought of meeting you that next morning was—­unendurable.”

She too uttered a little laugh but it sounded like one of pure happiness.  She buried her face in his hands and touched each palm with her lips.  “I couldn’t have borne it if you’d said the other thing,” she told him.  “But I might have trusted you not to.  Because you’re not a sentimentalist.  You’re almost the only person I know who is not.”

She added a moment later, with a sudden tightening of her grip upon his hands, “Have you, too, discovered that sentimentality is the crudest thing in the world?  It is.  It is perfectly ruthless.  It makes more tragedies than malice.  Ludicrous tragedies—­which are less endurable than the other sort.  Unless one were enough of an Olympian so that he could laugh.”  She relaxed again and made a nestling movement toward him.  “I thought for a while of you that way.”

He managed to speak as if the idea amused him.  “As an Olympian?  No, if I had a mountain it wouldn’t be that one.  But I like the valleys better, anyhow.”

“I know,” she said contentedly.  Then her voice darkened.  “I’m just at the beginning of you—­now...”  The sentence ended unnaturally, though he had done nothing to interrupt it.

Deliberately he startled her.  “What time does your train go, to-morrow?” he asked.  “Or haven’t you selected one?  You haven’t even told me where it is you are going.”

Through his hands which held her he felt the shock, the momentary agony of the effort to recover the threatened balance, the resolute relaxation of the muscles and the steadying breath she drew.