at my age, and in my position, prudence is as honorable an element in the offer I am making you as romance would be in a boy’s.  I make no apology for being prudent.  I state the fact that I’ve been so only that you may know that I’ve tried to look at this question from every point of view—­Dorothea’s as well as yours and mine.  I took my time about it, and long before I warned Mrs. Bayford that she was speaking of one who was dear to me, my mind was made up.  With such hopes as I had at heart it would have been wrong to have allowed her to go on without a word of warning.”

“I can see that it would have that aspect.”

“Then, if you can see that, you must see that I speak to you now in all sincerity.  My desire isn’t new.  I can truthfully say that, since the first day I saw you, your eyes and voice have haunted me, and the longing to be near you has never been absent from my heart.  I’ll be quite frank with you and say that, before you came here, it was my avowed intention not to marry again.  Now I have no desire on earth—­my child apart—­so strong as to win you for my wife.  The year we’ve spent under the same roof must have given you some idea of the man whom you’d be marrying; and I think I can promise you that with your help he would be a better man than in the past.  Won’t you say that I may hope for it?”

With arms supported by the high back of the chair and cheek on her clasped hands, she gazed away into the dimness of the room, as if waiting for him to continue; but during the silence that ensued it seemed to Derek as if a shadow crossed her features, while her bright look died out in a kind of wistfulness.  She had, perhaps, been hoping for a word he had not spoken—­a word whose absence he had only covered up by phrases.

“Well?  Have you nothing to say to me?” he asked, when some minutes had gone by.

“I’m thinking.”

“Of what?”

“Of what you say about prudence.  I like it.  It seems to me I ought to be prudent, too.”

“Undoubtedly,” he agreed, in the dry tone of one who assents to what he finds slightly disagreeable.

“I mean,” she said, quickly, “that I ought to be prudent for you—­for us all.  There are a great many things to be thought of, things which people of our age ought not to let pass unconsidered.  Men think the way through difficulties, while women feel it.  I’m afraid I must ask for time to get my instincts into play.”

“Do you mean that you can’t give me an answer to-night—­before I go on this long journey?”

“I couldn’t give you an affirmative one.”

“But you could say, No?”

“If you pressed the matter—­if you insisted—­that’s what I should have to say.”

“Why?”

“That would be—­my secret.”

“Is it that you think you couldn’t love me?”

For the first time the color came to her cheek and surged up to her temples, not suddenly or hotly, but with the semi-diaphanous lightness of roseate vapor mounting into winter air.  As he came nearer, rounding the protective barrier of the arm-chair, she retreated.