He nodded, pleased by her quickness.  “Two hundred years from now,” he conjectured, “the stubs of my checkbook will be exhibited in an historical museum along with the regalia of the last hereditary monarch.”

Here she did not follow, and she was too intelligent to pretend she did.

He lifted his eyebrows.  “Relic of a quaint old social structure inexplicably tolerated so late as the beginning of the twentieth century,”

“Oh, coal-mines forever!” she said, smiling, her eyes brilliant with friendly mockery.

“Aye! Toujours perdrix!” he admitted.  He continued to look steadily and seriously into her smiling, sparkling face, until, with a sudden pulse of premonition, she was stricken into a frightened gravity.  And then, with no prelude, no approach, quite simply and directly, he spoke.  “I wonder how much you care for me?” he said musingly, as he had said everything else that afternoon:  and as she positively paled at the eeriness of this echo from her own thought, he went on, his voice vibrating in the deep organ note of a great moment, “You must know, of course, by this time that I care everything possible for you.”

Compressed into an instant of acute feeling Sylvia felt the pangs which had racked her as a little girl when she had stood in the schoolyard with Camilla Fingal before her, and the terrifying hostile eyes about her.  Her two selves rose up against each other fiercely, murderously, as they had then.  The little girl sprang forward to help the woman who for an instant hesitated.  The fever and the struggle vanished as instantly as they had come.  Sylvia felt very still, very hushed.  Page had told her that she always rose to crucial moments.  She rose to this one.  “I don’t know,” she said as quietly as he, with as utter a bravery of bare sincerity, “I don’t know how much I care for you—­but I think it is a great deal.”  She rose upon a solemn wing of courage to a greater height of honesty.  Her eyes were on his, as clear as his.  The mere beauty of her face had gone like a lifted veil.  For a instant he saw her as Sylvia herself did not dream she could be.  “It is very hard,” said Sylvia Marshall, with clear eyes and trembling lips of honest humility, “for a girl with no money to know how much she cares for a very rich man.”

She had never been able to imagine what she would say if the moment should come.  She had certainly not intended to say this.  But an unsuspected vein of granite in her rang an instant echo to his truth.  She was bewildered to see his ardent gaze upon her deepen to reverence.  He took her hand in his and kissed it.  He tried to speak, but his voice broke.