Her spirit was finding compensation for the agonies of the past hours in a complete detachment.  Nothing she told him, no matter how close home it came, seemed to involve any painful emotion.  Her body, pressed so close against his that he could have felt the faintest muscle quiver, conveyed no message to him but the relaxation of complete security.

About himself there was a curious duality.  One of him was lulled irresistibly into sharing her mood of serene detachment.  The other, recognizing the transitoriness of hers, knowing that when this interlude came to an end, as come it must, the storm would break upon them once more, was casting about desperately for the means of saving her.

He had come to see the situation with her own eyes, fairly felt the clutch of it upon his own heart.  She or some impish power acting through her agency had certainly made a mess of things.  Her father’s happiness destroyed; Rush’s partnership broken; and the whole Hickory Hill project ruined unless some one could be found to buy into it in Graham’s place; Graham humiliated, utterly cast adrift, irreparably hurt.  And the prospect for the future....

She had told him of her tramp about the streets yesterday with her newspaper clipping and he was able to feel the full terror of it; and, beyond the terror, the gray emptiness.

There was only one way out of the tangle and this was to marry the man she loved and knew loved her.  Well, he knew with merciless certainty what her answer would be when he asked her—­begged her—­to do that.  He had provided her with the answer himself, with his sophomoric talk about traveling light and refusing to wear harness.  And he’d worse than talked.  His flight from her at Hickory Hill was enough to show that these weren’t mere empty phrases.  And yet her life depended to-night upon his ability to persuade her, in the face of those phrases and that fact, to marry him.  So he sat very still, wondering how soon she would divine these undercurrents of his thought, listening while she talked to him.

The hours were slipping away, too.  A glance at the watch braceleted upon the wrist he held startled him and he covered it with his hand.  Had they already, he wondered, begun a search for her?  Her words supplied presently the answer to that question.  She was talking, with a dry sort of humor, about the commotions of that day.

He could not be sure he was getting it quite straight, for she was commenting upon events rather than narrating them.  Apparently she had telephoned to her brother at Hood’s apartment immediately after young Stannard left the house the evening or afternoon before, telling him not to bother about her, as she was going straight to bed.  Let him go to a show and be careful not to wake her when he came in.  She’d done this and gone to sleep at once, not waking until she’d heard him getting ready for bed in the adjoining room.  But after that she hadn’t been able to get off again.