Robert looked at her, his own face working, then he could bear it no longer.  He was over on the sofa beside Ellen and had her in his arms.  “You poor little thing,” he whispered.  “Don’t.  I have loved you ever since the first time I saw you.  I ought to have told you so before.  Don’t you love me a little, Ellen?”

But Ellen released herself with a motion of firm elusiveness and looked at him.  The tears still stood in her eyes, but her face was steady.  “I have been putting you out of my mind,” said she.

“But could you?” whispered Robert, leaning over her.

Ellen did not reply, but looked down and trembled.

“Could you?” repeated Robert, and there was in his voice that masculine insistence which is a true note of nature, and means the subjugation of the feminine into harmony.

Ellen did not speak, but every line in her body betrayed helpless yielding.

“You know you could not,” said Robert with triumph, and took her in his arms again.

But he reckoned without the girl, who was, after all, stronger than her natural instincts, and able to rise above and subjugate them.  She freed herself from him resolutely, rose, and stood before him, looking at him quite unfalteringly and accusingly.

“Why do you come now?” she asked.  “You say you have loved me from the first.  You came to see me, you walked home with me, and said things to me that made me think—­” She stopped.

“Made you think what, dear?” asked Robert.  He was pale and indescribably anxious and appealing.  It was suddenly revealed to him that this plum was so firmly attached to its bough of individuality that possibly love itself could not loosen it.

“You made me think that perhaps you did care a little,” said Ellen, in a low but unfaltering voice.

“You thought quite right, only not a little, but a great deal,” said Robert, firmly.

“Then,” said Ellen, “the moment I gave up going to college and went to work you never came to see me again; you never even spoke to me in the shop; you went right past me without a look.”

“Good God! child,” Robert interposed, “don’t you know why I did that?”

Ellen looked at him bewildered, then a burning red overspread her face.  “Yes,” she replied.  “I didn’t.  But I do now.  They would have talked.”

“I thought you would understand that,” said Robert.  “I had only the best motives for that.  I cannot speak to you in the factory any more than I have done.  I cannot expose you to remark; but as for my not calling, I believed what you said to my aunt and to me.  I thought that you had deliberately preferred a lower life to a higher one—­that you preferred earning money to something better.  I thought—­”

Robert fairly started as Ellen began talking with a fire which seemed to make her scintillate before his eyes.