“If you urged it on him,” she said at last, “I think he’d take it.”

“Then so much the better, from my point of view.”

“Precisely; but then your point of view is a mystery.  Not that it makes any difference,” she hastened to add.  “If my father accepts your loan, it will be for me to pay it back, in one way or another—­if I ever can.”

“We could talk of that,” he smiled, trying to be reassuring, “after more important things had been settled.”

“There wouldn’t be anything more important—­for me.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t find me an importunate creditor.”

“That wouldn’t help matters—­so long as I owed the debt.  After all, we belong to that old-fashioned, rather narrow-minded class of New England people to whom debt of any kind is the source of something like anguish.  At least,” she corrected herself, “I belong to that class.”

It was on his lips to remind her that in her case there could be no present release from indebtedness, there could only be a change of creditors; but he decided to express himself more gracefully.

“Wouldn’t it be possible,” he asked, “to put the boot on the other foot, and to consider me as the person to whom the favor is shown in being allowed to do something useful?”

She lifted her chin scornfully.  “That would be childish.  It would be a mere quibbling with words.”

“But it would be true.  It’s the way I should take it.”

She confronted him with one of her imperious looks.  “Why?”

In the monosyllable there was a demand for complete explanation, but he met it with one of his frank smiles.

“Couldn’t you let me keep that as my secret?”

“So that you would be acting in the daylight and we in the dark.”

“You might be in the dark, and still have nothing to be afraid of.”

She shook her head.  “I should be afraid.  It was in the dark, according to the old story, that the antelope escaped a lion by falling into a hunter’s trap.”

“Do I look like that kind of a hunter?” He smiled again at the absurdity of her comparison.

“You can’t tell anything from looks—­with men.  With men a woman has only one principle to guide her—­to keep on the safe side.”

“I hope you won’t think me uncivil, Miss Guion, if I point out that, at present, you haven’t got a safe side to keep on.  That’s what I want to offer you.”

“I might ask you why again, only that we should be going round in a circle.  Since you don’t mean to tell me, I must go without knowing; but I’m sure you can understand that to some natures the lion is less to be feared than the hunter.”

“He doesn’t feel so.”  He nodded his head in the direction of Tory Hill.

“He feels so.  He’s only a little—­wavering.”

“And I guess you’re a little wavering, too, Miss Guion, if you’d only own up to it.”

He watched her straighten her slight figure while her delicate features hardened to an expression of severity.  “I’m not wavering on the principle, nor because of anything I should have to face myself.  If I have any hesitation, it’s only because of what it would mean for papa.”