“I shouldn’t if it wasn’t important.  I don’t want to annoy you more than I can help.”

“I don’t see how anything can be important when—­when there’s nothing to be done.”

“There’s a good deal to be done if we choose to do it; but we must choose at once.  The Benn crowd is getting restive.”

“That doesn’t make any difference to us.  My father has decided to take the consequences of his acts.”

“You say that so serenely that I guess you don’t understand yet just what they’d be.”

“I do—­I do, perfectly.  My father and I have talked it all over.  We know it will be terrible; and yet it would be more terrible still to let some one else pay our debts.  I dare say you think me monstrous, but—­”

“I think you mistaken.  I don’t want to say more than that.  If I find Mr. Guion of the same opinion—­”

“I see.  You don’t consider my word sufficient.”

“Your word is all right, Miss Guion,” he tried to laugh.  “What you lack is authority.  My dealings are with your father.  I can’t settle anything with—­a substitute.”

She colored swiftly.  “I don’t presume to settle anything.  I only thought I might give you some necessary information.  I hoped, too, to save you a little trouble in sparing you the walk to Tory Hill.”

He looked away from her, his eyes wandering up the reach of the river, over which the long, thin, many-oared college craft shot like insects across a pool.

“Why should you be so bent on seeing your father follow Jack Berrington, when it could be avoided?”

“Why should you care?  What difference does it make to you?  If you’d only explain that—­”

“It explains itself.  If I saw a woman leap into the river there I should pull her out.  The more she insisted on being drowned, the more I should try to save her.”

“But, you see, I’m not leaping into a river.  On the contrary, I’m getting out of one.  It seems to me that you’d be only forcing me back and making my last state worse than the first.”

It took him a minute to grasp the force of this.  “That would depend, of course, on the point of view.  As a matter of fact, it’s something with which I’ve nothing to do.  It concerns you, and it concerns Mr. Guion, but it doesn’t concern me.  For me the whole thing is very simple.  I’ve offered to lend Mr. Guion a sum of money.  It’s for him to take or to leave.  If he refuses it, I sha’n’t be offended; and if he doesn’t refuse it—­”

“You’d let him have it, just the same?”

“Of course.  Why not?”

“In spite of all I’ve said as to what I should feel?”

“But I’m not supposed to know anything about that, you know.  I repeat that it isn’t my affair.  If Mr. Guion should accept my loan against your wishes—­well, that’s something you’d have to fix up with him.”

She was some minutes silent, her eyes ranging over the river and the marshes, like his own.