She closed her eyes, recalling the words and the occasion of them.  “You are merely wasting time and sentiment on this young upstart of a country lawyer, Elinor.  So long as you were content to make it a summer day’s amusement, I had nothing to say; you are old enough and sensible enough to choose your own recreations.  But in justice to yourself, no less than to him, you must let it end with our going home.  You haven’t money enough for two.”

Her eyes grew hot under the closed lids when she remembered.  At the time the hard saying was evoked there was money enough for two, if David Kent would have shared it.  But he had held his peace and gone away, and now there was not enough for two.

Elinor faced her major weakness unflinchingly.  She was not a slave to the luxuries—­the luxuries of the very rich.  On the contrary, she had tried to make herself believe that hardness was a part of her creed.  But latterly, she had been made to see that there was a formidable array of things which she had been calling comforts:  little luxuries which Brookes Ormsby’s wife might reckon among the simplest necessities of the daily life, but which David Kent’s wife might have to forego; nay, things which Elinor Brentwood might presently have to forego.  For she compelled herself to front the fact of the diminished patrimony squarely.  So long as the modest Western Pacific dividends were forthcoming, they could live comfortably and without pinching.  But failing these——­

“No, I’m not great enough,” she confessed, with a little shiver.  “I should be utterly miserable.  If I could afford to indulge in ideals it would be different; but I can’t—­not when one word of mine will build a barrier so high that all the soul-killing little skimpings can never climb over it.  And besides, I owe something to mother and Nell.”

It was the final straw.  When any weakness of the human heart can find a seeming virtue to go hand in hand with it, the battle is as good as lost; and at that moment Brookes Ormsby, placidly refilling his short pipe in the smoking-room of the Pullman, was by no means in the hopeless case he was sometimes tempted to fancy himself.

As may be surmised, a diligent suitor, old enough to plan thoughtfully, and yet young enough to simulate the youthful ardor of a lover whose hair has not begun to thin at the temples, would lose no ground in a three days’ journey and the opportunities it afforded.

In Penelope’s phrase, Elinor “suffered him”, enjoying her freedom from care like a sleepy kitten; shutting the door on the past and keeping it shut until the night when their through sleeper was coupled to the Western Pacific Flyer at A.& T. Junction.  But late that evening, when she was rummaging in her hand-bag for a handkerchief, she came upon David Kent’s letter and read it again.

“Loring tells me you are coming West,” he wrote.  “I assume there is at least one chance in three that you will pass through Gaston.  If you do, and if the hour is not altogether impossible, I should like to meet your train.  One thing among the many the past two years have denied me—­the only thing I have cared much about, I think—­is the sight of your face.  I shall be very happy if you will let me look at you—­just for the minute or two the train may stop.”