“I won’t ask you to wait for me.  I’m perfectly willing to release you from your engagement if you like.  It seems only fair to you.”

“You care a lot, don’t you, about what’s fair to me?  I believe you’d take the bread out of my mouth to give it to her.”

“I would, Flossie, if it was her bread.  That money doesn’t belong to you or me; it belongs to Miss Harden.”

“It seems to me,” said Flossie, “that everything belongs to her.  I’m sure you’ve as good as told me so.”

“I’ve certainly given you some right to think so.  But that has nothing to do with it; and we agreed that we were going to let it alone, didn’t we?”

“It wasn’t me that brought it up again, it was you; and it’s got everything to do with it.  You wouldn’t have behaved like this, and you wouldn’t be sitting there talking about what’s honourable, if it hadn’t been for Miss Harden.”

“That may very well be.  But it doesn’t mean what you think it does.  It means that before I knew Miss Harden I didn’t know or care very much about what’s honourable.  She taught me to care.  I wasn’t fit to speak to a decent woman before I knew her.  She made me decent.”

“Did she sit up half the night with you to do it?”.

He made a gesture of miserable impatience.

“You needn’t tell me.  I can see her.”

“You can’t.  She did it by simply being what she is.  If I ever manage to do anything right it will be because of her, as you say.  But it doesn’t follow that it’ll be for her.  There’s a great difference.”

“I don’t see it.”

“You must try to see it.  There’s one thing I haven’t told you about that confounded money.  It was I who let her in for losing it.  Isn’t that enough to make me keen?”

“You always were keen where she was concerned.”

“Look here, Flossie, I thought you were going to give up this sort of thing?”

“So I was when I thought you were going to give her up.  It doesn’t look like it.”

“My dear child, how can I give up what I never had or could have?”

“Well then—­are you going to give up your idea?”

“No, I am not.  But you can either give me up or wait for me, as I said.  But if you marry me, you must marry me and my idea too.  You don’t like my idea; but that’s no reason why you shouldn’t like me.”

“You’re not taking much pains to make me like you.”

“I’m taking all the pains I know.  But your liking or not liking me won’t alter me a little bit.  You’ll have to take me as I am.”

As she looked up at him she realized at last the indomitable nature of the man she had to deal with.  And yet he was not unalterable, even on his own showing.  She knew some one who had altered him out of all knowledge.

“Come,” said she, “don’t say you never change.”

“I don’t say it.  You’ll have to allow for that possibility, too.”

“It seems to me I have to allow for a good many things.”