She raised her head and looked at him.

Again, her pride had been plucking at her heartstrings, burning her with the remembrance that he, when he gave her everything that a man could give, had done it in a manner perfect and without flaw.  And now she, with her infinitely smaller offering, sat tongue-tied and ineffectual, unable to give with a show of the purple, too poor-spirited even to yield him the truth for his truth which alone made the gift worth the offering.

Her blood, her spirit, and all her inheritance rallied at the call of her pride.  She looked at him, and made her gaze be steady:  though this seemed to her the hardest thing she had ever done in her life.

“I must not let you think that I wanted to do this only for your father’s sake.  That would not be honest.  Part of my pleasure in planning it—­most of it, perhaps—­was because I—­I should so much like to do something for your father’s son.”

She rose, trying to give the movement a casual air, and went over to her little desk, pretending to busy herself straightening out the litter of papers upon it.  From this safe distance, her back toward him, she forced herself to add:—­

“This reformatory will take the place of the one you—­would have won for us.  Don’t you see?  Half-my happiness in giving it is gone, unless you will lend me the name.”

Behind her the silence was impenetrable.

She stood at her desk, methodically sorting papers which she did not see, and wildly guessing at the meaning of that look of turbulent consciousness which she had seen break startled into his eyes.  More even than in their last meeting, she had found that the sight of his face, wonderfully changed yet even more wonderfully the same, deeply affected her to-day.  Its new sadness and premature age moved her strangely; with a peculiar stab of compassion and pain she had seen for the first time the gray in the nondescript hair about his temples.  For his face, she had seen that the smooth sheath of satisfied self-absorption, which had once overlain it like the hard veneer on a table-top, had been scorched away as in a baptism by fire; from which all that was best in it had come out at once strengthened and chastened.  And she thought that the shining quality of honesty in his face must be such as to strike strangers on the street.

And now, behind her on the office floor, she heard his footsteps, and in one breath was suddenly cold with the fear that her hour had come, and hot with the fear that it had not.

Engrossed with her papers, she moved so as to keep her back toward him; but he, with a directness which would not flinch even in this untried emergency, deliberately intruded himself between her and the table; and so once more they stood face to face.

“I don’t understand you,” he began, his manner at its quietest.  “Why do you want to do this for me?”

At this close range, she glanced once at him and instantly looked away.  His face was as white as paper; and when she saw that her heart first stopped beating, and then pounded off in a wild frightened paean.