“Well?” This time from Freda, but softly and anxiously.

“I don’t know what to say,” he hastened to answer, adding to himself that it was coming along quicker than he had expected.  “Nothing I’d like better, Freda.  You know that well enough.”  He pressed her hand, palm to palm.  She nodded.  Could she wonder that she despised the breed?

“But you see, I—­I’m engaged.  Of course you know that.  And the girl’s coming into the country to marry me.  Don’t know what was up with me when I asked her, but it was a long while back, and I was all-fired young—­”

“I want to go away, out of the land, anywhere,” she went on, disregarding the obstacle he had reared up and apologized for.  “I have been running over the men I know and reached the conclusion that—­that—­”

“I was the likeliest of the lot?”

She smiled her gratitude for his having saved her the embarrassment of confession.  He drew her head against his shoulder with the free hand, and somehow the scent of her hair got into his nostrils.  Then he discovered that a common pulse throbbed, throbbed, throbbed, where their palms were in contact.  This phenomenon is easily comprehensible from a physiological standpoint, but to the man who makes the discovery for the first time, it is a most wonderful thing.  Floyd Vanderlip had caressed more shovel-handles than women’s hands in his time, so this was an experience quite new and delightfully strange.  And when Freda turned her head against his shoulder, her hair brushing his cheek till his eyes met hers, full and at close range, luminously soft, ay, and tender—­why, whose fault was it that he lost his grip utterly?  False to Flossie, why not to Loraine?  Even if the women did keep bothering him, that was no reason he should make up his mind in a hurry.  Why, he had slathers of money, and Freda was just the girl to grace it.  A wife she’d make him for other men to envy.  But go slow.  He must be cautious.

“You don’t happen to care for palaces, do you?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Well, I had a hankering after them myself, till I got to thinking, a while back, and I’ve about sized it up that one’d get fat living in palaces, and soft and lazy.”

“Yes, it’s nice for a time, but you soon grow tired of it, I imagine,” she hastened to reassure him.  “The world is good, but life should be many-sided.  Rough and knock about for a while, and then rest up somewhere.  Off to the South Seas on a yacht, then a nibble of Paris; a winter in South America and a summer in Norway; a few months in England—­”

“Good society?”

“Most certainly—­the best; and then, heigho! for the dogs and sleds and the Hudson Bay Country.  Change, you know.  A strong man like you, full of vitality and go, could not possibly stand a palace for a year.  It is all very well for effeminate men, but you weren’t made for such a life.  You are masculine, intensely masculine.”