“Oh, I feel sure you can have no objections to me that are strong enough to weigh against thus providing suitably for your old relatives,” was the bait he dangled before her humiliated eyes.  “It is the only way to do it, for Mr. Alloway is too old to care any longer for the place, which has been run at a loss for too long already.  We may say that in accepting me you are accepting their comfortable future.  Of course you could not expect things to go on any longer in this impossible way, as I have need of the home and family I am really entitled to, now could you?” The Senator bent forward and finished his sentence in his most beguiling tone as he poured the hateful glance all over her again so that her blood stopped in her veins from very fear and repulsion.

“No,” she said slowly, with her eyes down on the bowl of butter on the table before her; “no, things couldn’t go on as they have any longer.  I have felt that for some time.”  She paused a second, then lifted her deep eyes and looked straight into his, and the wounded light in their blue depth was shadowed in the pride of the glance.  “You are right—­you must not be kept out of your own any longer.  But you will—­will you give me just a little time to—­to get used to—­to thinking about it?  Will you go now and leave me—­and come back in a few days?  It is the last favor I shall ever ask of you.  I promise when you come back to—­to pay the debt.”  And the color flooded over her face, then receded, to leave her white and controlled.

“I felt sure you would see it that way; immediately, immediately, my dear,” answered the Senator, as he rose to take his departure.  A triumphant note boomed in his big gloating voice, but some influence that it is given a woman to exhale in a desperate self-defense kept him from bestowing anything more than an ordinary pressure on the cold hand laid in his.  Then with a heavy jauntiness he crossed the Road, mounted his horse and, tipping his wide hat in a conquering-hero wave, rode on down Providence Road toward Boliver.

And for a long, quiet moment Rose Mary stood leaning against the old stone table perfectly still, with her hand pressing the sharp-edge paper against her heart; then she sank into a chair and, stretching her arms across the cold table, she let her head sink until the chill of the stone came cool to her burning cheeks.  So this was the door that was to be opened in the stone wall—­she had been blind and hadn’t seen!

And across the hills away by the sea he was tired and cold and hungry—­with only a few hundred dollars in his pocket.  He was discouraged and overworked, and a time was coming when she would not have the right to shelter his heart in hers.  Once when he had been so ill, before he ever became conscious of her at all, his head had fallen over on her breast as she had tended him in his weakness—­the throb of it hurt her now.  And perhaps he would never understand.  She couldn’t tell him because—­because of his poverty and the hurt