“Wouldn’t you rather?”

He raised himself stiffly into a sitting posture.  “Would you?”

She did not hesitate in her reply.  “Yes, papa.  I would rather—­if I were you.”

“But since you’re not me—­since you are yourself—­would you still rather that I went to Singville?”

There was a little lift to her chin, a faint color in her face as she replied:  “I’d rather pay—­however I did it.  I’d rather pay—­in any way—­than ask some one else to do it.”

He fell back on the cushion of violet brocade.  “So would I—­if I had only myself to think of.  We’re alike in that.”

“Do you mean that you’d rather do it if it wasn’t for me?”

“I’ve got to take everything into consideration.  It’s no use for me to make bad worse by refusing a good offer.  I must try to make the best of a bad business for every one’s sake.  I don’t want to take Davenant’s money.  It’s about as pleasant for me as swallowing a knife.  But I’d swallow a knife if we could only hush the thing up long enough for you to be married—­and for me to settle some other things.  I shouldn’t care what happened after that.  They might take me and chuck me into any hole they pleased.”

“But I couldn’t be married in that way, papa dear.  I couldn’t be married at all to—­to one man—­when another man had a claim on me.”

“Had a claim on you?  How do you mean?”

“He’ll have that—­if he pays for everything—­pays for everything for years and years back.  Don’t you see?”

“A claim on you for what, pray?”

“That’s what I don’t know.  But whatever it is, I shall feel that I’m in his debt.”

“Nonsense, dear.  I call that morbid.  It is morbid.”

“But don’t you think it’s what he’s working for?  I can’t see anything else that—­that could tempt him; and the minute we make a bargain with him we agree to his terms.”

There was a long silence before he said, wearily: 

“If we call the deal off we must do it with our eyes open to the consequences.  Ashley would almost certainly throw you over—­”

“No; because that possibility couldn’t arise.”

“And you’ll have to be prepared for the disgrace—­”

“I shall not look on it as disgrace so much as—­paying.  It will be paying for what we’ve had—­if not in one sort of coin, then in another.  But whatever it is, we shall be paying the debt ourselves; we sha’n’t be foisting it off on some one else.”

“Why do you say we?”

“Well, won’t it be we?  I shall have my part in it, sha’n’t I?  You wouldn’t shut me out from that?  I’ve had my share of the—­of the wrong, so I ought to take my share in the reparation.  My whole point is that we should be acting together.”

“They can’t put you in Singville.”