So they sat together before the fire gravely, like old married people, as Kate could not help noticing.  Yet they were combatants; not as a married couple might have been, furtively and miserably, but with a frank, almost an exhilarating, sense of equally matched strength, and of their chance to conduct their struggle in the open.

“It’s come to this, Kate,” he said at length.  “Either I must have your promise or I stay away entirely.”

“I don’t believe you need to do either,” she retorted with the exasperating manner of an elder sister.  “It’s an obsession with you, that’s all.”

“What man thinks he needs, he does need,” Ray responded sententiously.  “It appears to me that without you I shall be a lost man.  I mean precisely what I say.  You wouldn’t like me to give out that fact in an hysterical manner, and I don’t see that I need to.  I make the statement as I would make any other, and I expect to be believed, because I’m a truth-telling person.  The fairest scene in the world or the most interesting circumstance becomes meaningless to me if you are not included in it.  It isn’t alone that you are my sweetheart—­the lady of my dreams.  It’s much more than that.  Sometimes when I’m with you I feel like a boy with his mother, safe from all the dreadful things that might happen to a child.  Sometimes you seem like a sister, so really kind and so outwardly provoking.  Often you are my comrade, and we are completely congenial, neuter entities.  The thing is we have a satisfaction when we are together that we never could apart.  There it is, Kate, the fact we can’t get around.  We’re happier together than we are apart!”

He seemed to hold the theory up in the air as if it were a shining jewel, and to expect her to look at it till it dazzled her.  But her voice was dull as she said:  “I know, Ray.  I know—­now—­but shall we stay so?”

“Why shouldn’t we, woman?  There’s every reason to suppose that we’d grow happier.  We want each other.  More than that, we need each other.  With me, it’s such a deep need that it reaches to the very roots of my being.  It’s my groundwork, my foundation stone.  I don’t know how to put it to make you realize—­”

He caught a quizzical smile on her face, and after a moment of bewilderment he leaped from his chair and came toward her.

“God!” he half breathed, “why do I waste time talking?”

He had done what her look challenged him to do,—­had substituted action for words,—­yet now, as he stretched out his arms to her, she held him off, fearful that she would find herself weeping on his breast.  It would be sweet to do it—­like getting home after a long voyage.  But dizzily, with a stark clinging to a rock of integrity in herself, she fought him off, more with her militant spirit than with her outspread, protesting hands.

“No, no,” she cried.  “Don’t hypnotize me, Ray!  Leave me my judgment, leave me my reason.  If it’s a partnership we’re to enter into, I ought to know the terms.”