“God!” groaned Marshby to himself, “it is a fight.  I can’t refuse it.”

Wilmer put his question without mercy.  “Do you want to?”

“I want her to be happy,” said Marshby, with a simple humility afar from cowardice.  “I want her to be safe.  I don’t see how anybody could be safe—­with me.”

“Well,” pursued Wilmer, recklessly, “would she be safe with me?”

“I think so,” said Marshby, keeping an unblemished dignity.  “I have thought that for a good many years.”

“But not happy?”

“No, not happy.  She would—­We have been together so long.”

“Yes, she’d miss you.  She’d die of homesickness.  Well!” He sat contemplating Marshby with his professional stare; but really his mind was opened for the first time to the full reason for Mary’s unchanging love.  Marshby stood there so quiet, so oblivious of himself in comparison with unseen things, so much a man from head to foot, that he justified the woman’s loyal passion as nothing had before.  “Shall you accept the consulate?” Wilmer asked, abruptly.

Brought face to face with fact, Marshby’s pose slackened.  He drooped perceptibly.  “Probably not,” he said.  “No, decidedly not.”

Wilmer swore under his breath, and sat, brows bent, marvelling at the change in him.  The man’s infirmity of will had blighted him.  He was so truly another creature that not even a woman’s unreasoning championship could pull him into shape again.

Mary Brinsley came swiftly down the path, trowel in one hand and her basket of weeds in the other.  Wilmer wondered if she had been glancing up from some flowery screen and read the story of that altered posture.  She looked sharply anxious, like a mother whose child is threatened.  Jerome shrewdly knew that Marshby’s telltale attitude was no unfamiliar one.

“What have you been saying?” she asked, in laughing challenge, yet with a note of anxiety underneath.

“I’m painting him in,” said Wilmer; but as she came toward him he turned the canvas dexterously.  “No,” said he, “no.  I’ve got my idea from this.  To-morrow Marshby’s going to sit.”

That was all he would say, and Mary put it aside as one of his pleasantries made to fit the hour.  But next day he set up a big canvas in the barn that served him as workroom, and summoned Marshby from his books.  He came dressed exactly right, in his every-day clothes that had comfortable wrinkles in them, and easily took his pose.  For all his concern over the inefficiency of his life, as a life, he was entirely without self-consciousness in his personal habit.  Jerome liked that, and began to like him better as he knew him more.  A strange illuminative process went on in his mind toward the man as Mary saw him, and more and more he nursed a fretful sympathy with her desire to see Marshby tuned up to some pitch that should make him livable to himself.  It seemed a cruelty of nature that any man should so scorn his own company and yet be forced to keep it through an allotted span.  In that sitting Marshby was at first serious and absent-minded.  Though his body was obediently there, the spirit seemed to be busy somewhere else.