“I know,” she said, her hand on his, “it is worth a great deal.  But I don’t want to marry anybody.”  It was the old cry reiterated.  “I want to live the life I have planned for a little while—­then if Love claims me, it must be love—­not just a comfortable getting a home for myself along the lines of least resistance.  I want to work and earn, and know that I can do it.  If I were to marry you, it would be just because I couldn’t see any other way out of my difficulties, and you wouldn’t want me that way, Porter.”

He did want her.  But he recognized the futility of wanting her.  For a little while, at least, he must let her have her way.  Indeed, she would have it, whether he let her or not.  But Roger Poole should not have her.  He should not.  All that was primitive in Porter rose to combat the claims which she made for his rival.

“I knew there’d be trouble when you let the Tower Rooms,” he said heavily at last; “a man like that always appeals to a girl’s sense of romance.”

The Tower Rooms!  Mary saw Roger as he had stood in them for the first time amid all the confusion of Constance’s flight from the home nest.  That night he had seemed to her merely a person who would pay the rent—­yet the money which she had received from him had been the smallest part.

She drifted away on the tide of her dreams, and Porter felt sharply the sense of her utter detachment from him.

“Mary,” he said, tensely, “Mary, oh, my little Contrary Mary—­you aren’t going to slip out of my life.  Say that you won’t.”

“I’m not slipping away from you,” she said, “any more than I am slipping away from my old self.  I don’t understand it, Porter.  I only know that what you call contrariness is a force within me which I can’t control.  I wish that I could do the things which you want me to do, I wish I could be what Gordon and Constance and Barry and even Aunt Frances want—­but there’s something which carries me on and on, and seems to say, ’There’s more than this in the world for you’—­and with that call in my ears, I have to follow.”

He rose, and his head was up.  “All my life, I have wanted just one thing which has been denied me—­and that one thing is you.  And no other man shall take you from me.  I suppose I’ve got to set myself another season of patience.  But I can wait, because in the end I shall get what I want—­remember that, Mary.”

“Don’t be too sure, Porter.”

“I am so sure,” lifting the hand which was weighted with the heavy ring, “I am so sure, that I will make a wager with fortune, that the day will come when this ring shall be our betrothal ring, I’ll give you others, Mary, but this shall be the one which shall bind you to me.”

She snatched her hand away.  “You speak as if you were—­sure,” she said.

“I am.  I’m going to let you work and do as you please for a little while, if you must.  But in the end I’m going to marry you, Mary.”