He came up the portico steps to the level on which she was standing.  “Tell me that first,” he begged.

“You didn’t ask him for it?  Did you?”

In the French window, as she was about to enter the room, she half turned round.  “I don’t think it would bear that construction; but it might.  I’d rather you judged for yourself.  I declined it at first—­and then I said I’d take it.  I don’t know whether you’d call that asking.  But please come in.”

He followed her into the oval room, where they were screened from neighborly observation, while, with the French window open, they had the advantage of the air and the rich, westering sunshine.  Birds hopped about in the trees, and now and then a gray squirrel darted across the grass.

“I should think,” he said, nervously, before she had time to begin her explanation, “that a fellow who had done that for you would occupy your mind to the exclusion of everybody else.”

Guessing that he hoped for a disclaimer on her part, she was sorry to be unable to make it.

“Not to their exclusion—­but perhaps—­a little to their subordination.”

He pretended to laugh.  “What a pretty distinction!”

“You see, I haven’t been able to help it.  He’s loomed up so tremendously above everything—­”

“And every one.”

“Yes,” she admitted, with apologetic frankness, “and every one—­that is, in the past few days—­that it’s as if I couldn’t see anything but him.”

“Oh, I’m not jealous,” he exclaimed, pacing up and down the length of the room.

“Of course not,” she agreed, seating herself in one of the straight-backed chairs.  Her clasped hands rested on the small round table in the center of the room, while she looked out across the lawn to the dahlias and zinnias on its farther edge.

Ashley, who had flung his panama on a sofa, continued to pace up and down the room, his head bent and his fingers clasped tightly under his jacket behind his back.  He moved jerkily, like a man preserving outward self-control in spite of extreme nervous tension.

He listened almost without interruption while she gave him a precise account of Davenant’s intervention in her father’s troubles.  She spared no detail of her own opposition and eventual capitulation.  She spoke simply and easily, as though repeating something learned by heart, just as she had narrated the story of Guion’s defaulting in the morning.  Apart from the fact that she toyed with a paper-knife lying on the table, she sat rigidly still, her eyes never wandering from the line of autumn flowers on the far side of the lawn.

“So you see,” she concluded, in her quiet voice, “I came to understand that it was a choice between taking it from him and taking it from the poor women papa had ruined; and I thought that as he was young—­and strong—­and a man—­he’d be better able to bear it.  That was the reason.”

He came to a standstill on the other side of the table, where he could see her in profile.