“I didn’t give it—­he took it.  I couldn’t stop him.”

“Did you want to?”

“I thought of it—­sometimes—­till I gave up being engaged to Billy.”

“And having passed that mental crisis, I suppose it didn’t matter.”

“Well, the mental crisis, as you call it, left me free.  I sha’n’t have to reproach myself—­”

“No; Mr. Merrow will do that for you.”

“Of course he will.  I expect him to.  It would be very queer if he didn’t.  I shall have a dreadful time making him see things my way.  And with all that hanging over me, I should think I might look for a little sympathy from you, Aunt Helen.  Lots of girls wouldn’t have said anything about it.  But I told you because I want you to see I’m perfectly straight and above-board.”

Mrs. Jarrott said no more for the moment, but later in the day she confided to her husband that the girl puzzled her.  “She mixes me up so that I don’t know which of us is talking sense.”  She was not at all sure that Evie was fretting about Mr. Strange—­though she might be.  If she wasn’t, then she couldn’t be well.  That was the only explanation of her depression and loss of appetite.

“You can bet your life he’s thinking of her,” Mr. Jarrott said, with the lapse from colloquial dignity he permitted himself when he got into his house-jacket.  “He’s praying to her image as if it was a wooden saint.”

With the omission of the word wooden this was much what Strange was doing at Rosario.  Not venturing—­in view of all the circumstances—­to write to her, he could only erect a shrine in his heart, and serve it with a devotion very few saints enjoy.  He found, however, that absence from her did not enable him to form detached and impartial opinions on his situation, just as work brought no subconsciously reached solution to the problems he had to face.  In these respects he was disappointed in the results of his unnecessary flight from town.

At the end of two months he was still mentally where he was when he left Buenos Aires.  His intelligence assured him that he had the right of a man who has no rights to seize and carry off what he can; while that nameless something else within him refused to ratify the statement.  What precise part of him raised this obstacle he was at a loss to guess.  It could not be his conscience, since he had been free of conscience ever since the night on Lake Champlain.  Still less could it be his heart, seeing that his heart was crying out for Evie Colfax more fiercely than a lion roars for food.  The paralysis of his judgment had become such that he was fast approaching the determination to make Love the only arbiter, and let all the rest go hang!