A longer pause followed, in which he regarded her with an increasing anxiety.  Her face was turned away, her progress grew slower until they stood by the shadowy bulk of a small stone structure.  The door was open, and it seemed to him that she looked within.  “A store house,” he explained.  Nothing was visible in the interior gloom but some obscure shapes, bales, piled against the walls, and the scant tracery of a rude stair leading up to a greater blackness above.  She stopped, as if arrested by his period, laying a hand on the door frame.

“Why don’t you answer me, Susan?” he proceeded.  “You know that I want to marry you; surely it is all right now.  Everything possible has been done.  A great deal of life remains.”  Her answer was so low that it almost escaped him; the faintest breath of pain, of longing and regret.  “I can’t,” she whispered; “not with her, the child.  I can’t.”

“That,” he replied gently, “is a mistaken idea of responsibility, a needless sacrifice.  I could never urge you into an injustice, a wrong; at last I have got above that; what I want is the most reasonable thing imaginable, the best, in every conceivable way, for yourself and—­any other.  You are harming, depriving, no one.  You are taking nothing but your own, what has been yours, and only yours, from the first moment I saw, no—­from my birth.  What has happened brought me in a straight road to you, the long road I have never, really, left.”

“I can’t,” she said still again.  “I want to, Jasper.  Oh, with a heart full of longing; I am so tired that I would almost give the rest of my life for another secure hour with you.  And I would pay that to give you what you want, what you should have.  But something stronger than I am, more than all this, holds me; I can’t forget that miserable woman, nor her child and yours, so thin and suspicious.  I am not good enough to be her mother myself, even if I felt I had the right.  Inside of me I am quite wicked, selfish.  I want my own.  But not with the other woman outside.  She’d be looking in at the windows, Jasper, looking in at my heart.  I would hear her.”  She leaned against her arm, her face hid, her shoulders trembling.

The musty odour of the stores floated out and enveloped him.  He was suddenly annoyed.  Susan herself lost some of her beauty, her radiance.  He muttered that she was merely stubborn, blind to reality, to necessity.  His attitude hardened, and he commenced to argue in a low, insistent voice.  She made no reply, but remained supported in the doorway, a vague form against the inner dark.

“You must change your mind,” he asserted; “you can’t be eternally so foolish.  There is absolutely no question of my marrying Essie Scofield.”

“I don’t want you to, really,” she admitted in an agonized whisper.  “I shall never again ask you to do that.  Ah, God, how low I am.”