She turned impulsively.  “Then I take it back.  You have a certain right, it’s true.  You have been a good friend, and I owe you much.  It’s because I’m foolishly sensitive about this little cottage.  I can see, of course, that it looks like a poor place to a man who lives in one of the finest houses in the State of Maryland, but I can’t let that influence me.  If you happened to be the sort of man who loves to go off into the woods and live in a log shack for a whole hunting-season you’d understand its charm for me.  I don’t in the least mind washing my face in a tin basin.  You do mind.”

“Not when you offer it.  But it’s not the tin basin I object to.  That is—­”

“It is the tin basin.  You don’t like to see a woman live in such a plain way.  But I tell you this, Mr. Brant:  she can be just as much a woman of refinement—­”

“My dear girl—­”

“Yes, I lost my temper for a minute,” she admitted.  “I shouldn’t have said that.  I shouldn’t offend you by implying that you don’t know it.  What I mean is that the luxuries you consider essential are not essential.  I was brought up among them.  I loved them as you do.  It is good for me to do without them—­I am conscious of it every day.  I shall be a stronger woman and a better woman if I can learn not to care.”

“But you haven’t wholly learned yet.”  He said it with satisfaction.

“I have learned!” She flung it at him.  “I don’t mind living in this simple way, except when a man like you comes along and tries, deliberately tries, to make me conscious of it.”

He leaned toward her with a sudden, passionate gesture.  “Charlotte, forgive me!  It is because I long so to take you away from it, to give you the sort of home you have known in the old days.  It fits you so well—­that sort of home.  You were a princess in the old home; you would be a queen in a new one.”

“Oh, don’t!”

“All right, I won’t.”

There was silence between them for some time after this.  Brant sat with his hands clenched and resting upon his knees, his head bent a little.  Charlotte had turned and laid one bended arm upon the high back of the old bench—­her head rested against it.  She was the first to speak, in the light tone with which her sex is accustomed to let a situation down from the heights of strong emotion to a more normal level.

“What do you do with a sitter who won’t let you bring out her best points, but insists on making herself into the stiffest sort of a lay figure?”

“Chloroform her and relax the tension.”  Brant’s tone was grim.  Then, suddenly, he looked up.  “Will you let me go in and make a flashlight of you by a new method I’ve worked out?  I promise you you’ll find it a trick worth knowing.”

“I shall be delighted.  You’ve taught me half I know, and I’m more grateful than I seem.”

“I hope that’s true,” he said, still in the grim tone, as they went up the garden path toward the house.