“David Kent?” said the mother.

The bowed head nodded a wordless assent.

“I sha’n’t say that I haven’t suspected him all along, dear.  I am afraid I have.  I have nothing against him.  But he is a poor man, Elinor; and we are poor, too.  You’d be miserably unhappy.”

“If he stays poor, it is I who am to blame,”—­this most contritely.  “He had a future before him:  the open door was his winning in the railroad fight, and I closed it against him.”

“You?” said the mother, astonished.

“Yes.  I told him he couldn’t go on in the way he meant to.  I made it a matter of conscience; and he—­he has turned back when he might have fought it out and made a name for himself, and saved us all.  And it was such a hair-splitting thing!  All the world would have applauded him if he had gone on; and there was only one woman in all the world to pry into the secret places of his soul and stir up the sleeping doubt!”

Now, if all the thrifty, gear-getting “faculty” of the dead and gone Grimkies had become thin and diluted and inefficient in this Mrs. Hepzibah, last of the name, the strong wine and iron of the blood of uprightness had come down to her unstrained.

“Tell me all about it, daughter,” she adjured; and when the tale was told, she patted the bowed head tenderly and spoke the words of healing.

“You did altogether right, Ellie, dear; I—­I am proud of you, daughter.  And if, as you say, you were the only one to do it, that doesn’t matter; it was all the more necessary.  Are you sure he gave it up?”

Elinor rose and stood with clasped hands beside her mother’s chair; a very pitiful and stricken half-sister of the self-reliant, dependable young woman who had boasted herself the head of the household.

“I have no means of knowing what he has done,” she said slowly.  “But I know the man.  He has turned back.”

There was a tap at the door and a servant was come to say that Mr. Brookes Ormsby was waiting with his auto-car.  Was Miss Brentwood nearly ready?

Elinor said, “In a minute,” and when the door closed, she made a confidante of her mother for the first time since her childhood days.

“I know what you have suspected ever since that summer in New Hampshire, and it is true,” she confessed.  “I do love him—­as much as I dare to without knowing whether he cares for me.  Must I—­may I—­say yes to Brookes Ormsby without telling him the whole truth?”

“Oh, my dear!  You couldn’t do that!” was the quick reply.

“You mean that I am not strong enough?  But I am; and Mr. Ormsby is manly enough and generous enough to meet me half-way.  Is there any other honest thing to do, mother?”

Mrs. Hepzibah shook her head deliberately and determinedly, though she knew she was shaking the Ormsby millions into the abyss of the unattainable.

“No; it is his just due.  But I can’t help being sorry for him, Ellie.  What will you do if he says it doesn’t make any difference?”