She smiled then and bent down and kissed him.  “But I won’t do the other thing either, my dear.  I’ll find some other way.  Really go to Omaha perhaps.  But I won’t marry you.  You see why, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” he said.  “I can tell you exactly why.  You don’t want to take away my freedom.  You want me to be a sort of—­what was that opera you spoke about at Hickory Hill?—­Chemineau.  Doing nothing but what I please.  Wandering off wherever I like.”  He smiled.  “Mary, dear, do you realize that you’re proposing to deal with me exactly as Graham Stannard would have dealt with you?  Trying to make an image of me?”

She started from his knees, retreated a pace or two and turned and confronted him.

“That’s not true,” she protested.  “That can’t possibly be true!”

He did not answer.  He had plenty of arguments with which to establish the parallel, his mind was aflame with phrases in which to plead his cause with her.  Somehow they wouldn’t come to his tongue.  It didn’t occur to him that fatigue had anything to do with this.  He was filled with a sudden fury that he could not talk to her.

She had turned away, restlessly, and moved to one of the dormer windows.  Following her with his eyes he saw the dawn coming.

He rose stiffly from his chair.  “I guess I had better take you home now,” he said.

She nodded and got her hat.  When he found her at the door after he had put out the lamp she clung to him for a moment in the dark and he thought she meant to speak, but she did not.

He helped her down the irregular shaky stair and then, along the gray cool empty street he walked with her toward the brightened sky.

She said, at last, “Graham wouldn’t let me tell him what the real me was like.  Tell me the truth about the real you.”

“There isn’t much to tell.  I guess I’m pretty much like any one else when it comes down to—­to ...  I don’t want to go on, alone.  I want to be woven in with you.  I want...”

He stood still in a vain effort to make the words come.  “I can’t talk!” he cried, and his voice broke in a sob.

“You needn’t,” she said; and pressing his hand against her breast she led him on again.  She was trembling and her hand was cold.

Nothing more was said between them, all the way.  But when they reached her door and managed to open it she stood for a moment peering through the dusk into his face.

“If it’s true...” she said.  “If you really want a home and a wife—­like me...  Oh, yes, I know it’s true!”

CHAPTER XXVI

JOHN ARRIVES

Two or three hours after March and Mary came to the Dearborn Avenue house that Sunday morning, a little before eight o’clock to be precise, John Wollaston, deterred by humane considerations from ringing the door-bell, tried his latch-key first and found it sufficient.  Rather surprisingly since his sister was particular about bolts and chains.  But this mild sensation was engulfed the next moment in clear astonishment when he encountered in the drawing-room doorway, Anthony March.