To-night there was a difference in the man.  His eyes met hers squarely, without evasion, but with a new quality, a searching, perhaps, for something in her to give him courage.  The girl had character, more than ordinary decision.  It was what Stewart admired in her most, and the thing, of course, that the little Marie had lacked.  Moreover, Anita, barely twenty, was a woman, not a young girl.  Her knowledge of the world, not so deep as Marie’s, was more comprehensive.  Where Marie would have been merciful, Anita would be just, unless she cared for him.  In that case she might be less than just, or more.

Anita in daylight was a pretty young woman, rather incisive of speech, very intelligent, having a wit without malice, charming to look at, keenly alive.  Anita in the dusk of the balcony, waiting to hear she knew not what, was a judicial white goddess, formidably still, frightfully potential.  Stewart, who had embraced many women, did not dare a finger on her arm.

He had decided on a way to tell the girl the story—­a preamble about his upbringing, which had been indifferent, his struggle to get to Vienna, his loneliness there, all leading with inevitable steps to Marie.  From that, if she did not utterly shrink from him, to his love for her.

It was his big hour, that hour on the balcony.  He was reaching, through love, heights of honesty he had never scaled before.  But as a matter of fact he reversed utterly his order of procedure.  The situation got him, this first evening absolutely alone with her.  That and her nearness, and the pathos of her bandaged, useless arm.  Still he had not touched her.

The thing he was trying to do was more difficult for that.  General credulity to the contrary, men do not often make spoken love first.  How many men propose marriage to their women across the drawing-room or from chair to chair?  Absurd!  The eyes speak first, then the arms, the lips last.  The woman is in his arms before he tells his love.  It is by her response that he gauges his chances and speaks of marriage.  Actually the thing is already settled; tardy speech only follows on swift instinct.  Stewart, wooing as men woo, would have taken the girl’s hand, gained an encouragement from it, ventured to kiss it, perhaps, and finding no rebuff would then and there have crushed her to him; What need of words?  They would follow in due time, not to make a situation but to clarify it.

But he could not woo as men woo.  The barrier of his own weakness stood between them and must be painfully taken down.

“I’m afraid this is stupid for you,” said Anita out of the silence.  “Would you like to go to the music-room?”

“God forbid.  I was thinking.”

“Of what?” Encouragement this, surely.

“I was thinking how you had come into my life, and stirred it up.”

“Really?  I?”

“You know that.”

“How did I stir it up?”

“That’s hardly the way I meant to put it.  You’ve changed everything for me.  I care for you—­a very great deal.”