He shook his head slowly.

“You don’t mean that.”

“But if I say that I do; if I insist that I am willing to be shamed out of it.”

His smile was that of a brother who remembers tardily to be loving-kind.

“I shall leave that task for some one who cares less for you and for your true happiness than I do, or ever shall.  And it will be a mighty thankless service that that ‘some one’ will render you.”

“But I ought to be whipped and sent to bed,” she protested, almost tearfully.  “Do you know what I have done?—­how I have——­”

She could not quite put it in words, even for him, and he helped her generously, as before.

“I know what Kent hasn’t done; which is more to the point.  But he will do it fast enough if you will give him half a chance.”

“No,” she said definitively.

“I say yes.  One thing, and one thing only, has kept him from telling you any time since last autumn:  that is a sort of finical loyalty to me.  I saw how matters stood when he came aboard of our train at Gaston—­I’m asking you to believe that I didn’t know it beforeand I saw then that my only hope was to make a handfast friend of him.  And I did it.”

“I believe you can do anything you try to do,” she said warmly.

This time his smile was a mere grimace.

“You will have to make one exception, after this; and so shall I. And since it is the first of any consequence in all my mounting years, it grinds.  I can’t throw another man out of the window and take his place.”

“If you were anything but what you are, you would have thrown him out of the window another way,” she rejoined.

“That would have been a dago’s trick; not a white man’s,” he asserted.  “I suppose I might have got in his way and played the dog in the manger generally, and you would have stuck to your word and married me, but I am not looking for that kind of a winning.  I don’t mind confessing that I played my last card when I released you from your engagement.  I said to myself:  If that doesn’t break down the barriers, nothing will.”

She looked up quickly.

“You will never know how near it came to doing it, Brookes.”

“But it didn’t quite?”

“No, it didn’t quite.”

The brother-smile came again.

“Let’s paste that leaf down and turn the other; the one that has David
Kent’s name written, at the top.  He is going to succeed all around,
Elinor; and I am going to help him—­for his sake, as well as yours.”

“No,” she dissented.  “He is going to fail; and I am to blame for it.”

He looked at her sidewise.

“So you were at the bottom of that, were you?  I thought as much, and tried to make him admit it, but he wouldn’t.  What was your reason?”

“I gave it to him:  I can’t give it to you.”

“I guess not,” he laughed.  “I wasn’t born on the right side of the Berkshire Hills to appreciate it.  But really, you mustn’t interfere.  As I say, we are going to make something of David; and a little conscience—­of the right old Pilgrim Fathers’ brand—­goes a long way in politics.”