She appeared to wait for his question.  But he remained silent, staring at the blue rim of distant hills.

“You don’t ask me—­you don’t seem to care what I was planning,” she said, her voice timid and uncertain.

He glanced quickly at her.  Something in her look stirred him curiously.  It did not occur to him that her appeal and his instant response to it were as old as the race.

“I wish you would tell me,” he urged.  “Tell me everything!”

She drew a deep breath, her eyes misty with dreams.

“For a long time I taught school,” she went on, “but I couldn’t save enough that way.  I never could have saved enough, even if I had lived on bread and water.  I wanted—­I needed a great deal of money, and I wasn’t clever nor particularly well educated.  Sometimes I thought if I could only marry a millionaire—­”

He stared at her incredulously.

“You don’t mean that,” he said with some impatience.

She sighed.

“I’m telling you just what happened,” she reminded him.  “It seemed the only way to get what I wanted.  I thought I shouldn’t mind that, or—­anything, if I could only have as much money as I needed.”

A sense of sudden violent anger flared up within him.  Did the girl realize what she was saying?

She glanced up at him.

“I never meant to tell any one about that part of it,” she said hurriedly.  “And—­it wasn’t necessary, after all; I got the money another way.”

He bit off the point of a pencil he had been sharpening with laborious care.

“I should probably never have had a chance to marry a millionaire,” she concluded reminiscently.  “I’m not beautiful enough.”

With what abominable clearness she understood the game:  the marriage-market; the buyer and the price.

“I—­didn’t suppose you were like that,” he muttered, after what seemed a long silence.

She seemed faintly surprised.

“Of course you don’t know me,” she said quickly.  “Does any man know any woman, I wonder?”

“They think they do,” he stated doggedly; “and that amounts to the same thing.”

His thoughts reverted for an uncomfortable instant to Wesley Elliot and Fanny.  It was only too easy to see through Fanny.

“Most of them are simple souls, and thank heaven for it!”

His tone was fervently censorious.

She smiled understandingly.

“Perhaps I ought to tell you further that a rich man—­not a millionaire; but rich enough—­actually did ask me to marry him, and I refused.”

“H’mph!”

“But,” she added calmly, “I think I should have married him, if I had not had money left me first—­before he asked me, I mean.  I knew all along that what I had determined to do, I could do best alone.”

He stared at her from under gathered brows.  He still felt that curious mixture of shame and anger burning hotly within.