Sidwell smiled indulgently.  “Beg your pardon.  I had forgotten our standards were not yet in conformity.  It is so considered—­here.”

Florence was very quiet until they reached the steps of her own home.  A light was in the open vestibule, another in the library, where Scotty, his feet comfortably enclosed in carpet-slippers and elevated above his head, was reading.  Then she turned to her escort.

“You won’t be offended, Mr. Sidwell, if I ask you a question?”

The electric light on the nearby corner shone full upon her soft brown face, a very serious face now, and the man’s glance lingered there.  “Certainly not,” he answered.

Florence hesitated.  Somehow, now that the moment for speaking had arrived, the thing she had in mind to say did not seem so easy after all.  At last she spoke, hesitatingly:  “You seem to be interested in me, seem to take pleasure in being in my company.  For the last few months we have been together almost daily, but up to that time we had lived lives as unlike as—­as the city is from the prairie.  I know you have many other friends, friends you’ve known all your life, whose ideals and points of view came from the same experience as your own.”  She straightened with dignity.  “Why is it that you leave those friends to come here?  Why do you find pleasure in taking me about as you do?  Why is it?”

Not once while she was speaking had the man’s eyes left her face; not once had he stirred.  Even after she was silent he remained so; and despite the compelling influence which had prompted the question, Florence could not but realize what she had done, what she had all but suggested.  The warm color flooded her face, though she held her eyes up bravely.  “Tell me why,” she repeated firmly.

Sidwell still hesitated.  Complex product of the higher civilization, mixture of good and bad, who knows what thoughts were running riot in his brain?  At last he aroused and came closer.  “You ask me a very hard question,” he said steadily; “the most difficult, I think, you could have chosen; one, also, which perhaps I have already asked myself.”  Again he took a step nearer.  “It is a question, Florence, that admits of but one answer; one both adequate and inadequate.  It is because you are you and woman, and I am I and man.”  Of a sudden his dark face grew swarthier still, his voice lapsed from its customary impersonal.  “It means, Florence Baker—­”

But the sentence was not completed.  As suddenly as the change had come to the man’s face, the girl had understood.  With an impulse she could not have explained to herself, she had drawn away and swiftly mounted the steps of the house.  Not until she reached the porch did she turn.

“Don’t, don’t, please!” she urged.  “I beg your pardon.  I shouldn’t have asked what I did.  Forget that I spoke at all.”  She was struggling for words, for breath.  Her color came and went.  “Good-night.”  And not trusting herself to look back, oblivious of courtesy, she almost ran into the house.