“But why,” said I, “did you turn with me? There would have been the moment for your will to act.”

“You think so?  That is hardly fair, Miss Linton.  Does one brand a soldier as a coward and a laggard who has fought and won a battle, and has sunk exhausted upon his arms to sleep, if he is discomfited and dismayed when, just as slumber has him in its arms, a fresh foe sets upon him?  No, I could not turn back.”

His eyes were bent on me again, and something in them stirred my soul to its depths.  Such a delicious feeling seemed stealing over me—­a feeling of mixed power and weakness.  I felt my color rise, but I looked ahead over the snowfields and said, “I don’t see why you should have turned back.  Why should you want to be with me and not be with me?  I wanted to see you too.”

I started as he spoke again, for his voice and manner were both changed—­all the quiver and intensity gone out of them.  “The ’reason why’ of a mood is hard to find sometimes, and when found one has a conviction that no one but one’s self would see its reasonableness,” he said with a laugh cold and musical.  “Let us talk of something we can both be sure to understand.”

He seemed far away again.  For a moment he had seemed so near—­nearer, I think, than I ever remember to have felt a man to be.  Then he talked, and talked very well, and made me talk, though it was not as easy as it usually is to me, and though we spoke of things that are generally to me like the sound of a trumpet to the war-horse.  My spirit did not rise:  the words would hardly come.  I wanted to be alone and think it over—­think over his words, his manner, his voice, the look in his eyes, and see what they meant, and, if I could, why he had changed so suddenly to me.

When we had walked some distance farther he himself proposed turning back, and took me home.  As we neared the hotel I could not resist asking him why he had not come home with me that night in the carriage instead of walking, or running rather, beside it.

Such a strange look came over his face as I asked him, and his lips set with a stern expression as he said stiffly, icily, “I had realized, Miss Linton, how utterly different our ways of looking at life must be; or else perhaps it is that you do not hold me to be enough of a knight to consider a woman’s position before my own comfort and pleasure.”

“I don’t understand you,” said I, bewildered.  “I asked you to get into the carriage.”

“I know it,” he replied; “but in such matters no gentleman can allow a woman’s kindly impulse of courtesy to compromise her in any way:  he must think first of her, and all the more because she has thought of him.”

“What do you mean by compromise?” I exclaimed.  “I am quite independent enough of public opinion to be a free agent in such matters:  you must not forget that I am a very different woman from a society belle.”

“Quite true,” he answered, stung by my tone, “but I do not claim to be unsexed because—­because—­” He stammered.