“You have had good news,” said Madelene, when they were in the dim daylight on the creeper-screened back porch.  For such was her generous interpretation of his expression of self-confidence and self-satisfaction.

“Not yet,” he replied, looking away reflectively.  “But I hope for it.”

There wasn’t any mistaking the meaning of that tone; she knew what was coming.  She folded her hands in her lap, and there softly entered and pervaded her a quiet, enormous content that made her seem the crown of the quiet beauty of that evening sky whose ocean of purple-tinted crystal stretched away toward the shores of the infinite.

“Madelene,” he began in a self-conscious voice, “you know what my position is, and what I get, and my prospects.  But you know what I was, too; and so, I feel I’ve the right to ask you to marry me—­to wait until I get back to the place from which I had to come down.”

The light was fading from the sky, from her eyes, from her heart.  A moment before he had been there, so near her, so at one with her; now he was far away, and this voice she heard wasn’t his at all.  And his words—­She felt alone in the dark and the cold, the victim of a cheat upon her deepest feelings.

“I was bitter against my father at first,” he went on.  “But since I have come to know you I have forgiven him.  I am grateful to him.  If it hadn’t been for what he did I might never have learned to appreciate you, to—­”

“Don’t—­please!” she said in the tone that is from an aching heart.  “Don’t say any more.”

Arthur was astounded.  He looked at her for the first time since he began; instantly fear was shaking his self-confidence at its foundations.  “Madelene!” he exclaimed.  “I know that you love me!”

She hid her face in her hands—­the sight of them, long and narrow and strong, filled him with the longing to seize them, to feel the throb of their life thrill from them into him, troop through and through him like victory-bringing legions into a besieged city.  But her broken voice stopped him.  “And I thought you loved me,” she said.

“You know I do!” he cried.

She was silent.

“What is it, Madelene?” he implored.  “What has come between us?  Does your father object because I am—­am not well enough off?”

She dropped her hands from before her face and looked at him.  The first time he saw her he had thought she was severe; ever since he had wondered how he could have imagined severity into a countenance so gentle and sweet.  Now he knew that his first impression was not imaginary; for she had again the expression with which she had faced the hostile world of Saint X until he, his love, came into her life.  “It is I that must ask you what has changed you, Arthur,” she said, more in sadness than in bitterness, though in both.  “I don’t seem to know you this evening.”