“I know,” she assented absently.

“Well, it’s the same way now.  But for your sake—­or rather for the sake of my love—­I am going to turn back for once.  You are free again, Elinor.  All I ask is that you will let me begin where I left off somewhere on the road between here and Boston last fall.”

She sat with clasped hands looking steadily at the darkened windows of the opposite house, and he let her take her own time.  When she spoke there was a thrill in her voice that he had never heard before.

“I don’t deserve it—­so much consideration, I mean,” she said; and he made haste to spare her.

“Yes, you do; you deserve anything the best man in the world could do for you, and I’m a good bit short of that.”

“But if I don’t want you to go back?”

He had gained something—­much more than he knew; and for a tremulous instant he was near to losing it again by a passionate retraction of all he had been saying.  But the cool purpose came to his rescue in time.

“I should still insist on doing it.  You gave me what you could, but I want more, and I am willing to do what is necessary to win it.”

Again she said:  “You are too good to me,” and again he contradicted her.

“No; it is hardly a question of goodness; indeed, I am not sure that it escapes being selfish.  But I am very much in earnest, and I am going to prove it.  Three years ago you met a man whom you thought you could love—­don’t interrupt me, please.  He was like some other men we know:  he didn’t have the courage of his convictions, lacking the few dollars which might have made things more nearly equal.  May I go on?”

“I suppose you have earned the right to say what you please,” was the impassive reply.

It was the old struggle in which they were so evenly matched—­of the woman to preserve her poise; of the man to break it down.  Another lover might have given up in despair, but Ormsby’s strength lay in holding on in the face of all discouragements.

“I believe, as much as I believe anything in this world, that you were mistaken in regard to your feeling for the other man,” he went on calmly.  “But I want you to be sure of that for yourself, and you can’t be sure unless you are free to choose between us.”

“Oh, don’t!—­you shouldn’t say such things to me,” she broke out; and then he knew he was gaining ground.

“Yes, I must.  We have been stumbling around in the dark all these months, and I mean to be the lantern-bearer for once in a way.  You know, and I know, and Kent is coming to know.  That man is going to be a success, Elinor:  he has it in him, and he sha’n’t lack the money-backing he may need.  When he arrives——­”

She turned on him quickly, and the blue-gray eyes were suspiciously bright.

“Please don’t bury me alive,” she begged.

He saw what he had done; that the nicely calculated purpose had carried straight and true to its mark; and for a moment the mixed motives, which are at the bottom of most human sayings and doings, surged in him like the sea at the vexed tide-line of an iron-bound coast.  But it was the better Brookes Ormsby that struggled up out of the elemental conflict.