“I believe you,” she said seriously, giving him both her hands, and looking bravely into his eyes.  “You are the best man I ever met—­I can’t let you go.  I believe it would be wrong to let you go.”  She hesitated, groped for words.  “You’re the only thing in the world that seems real to me,” Susan said.  “I knew that the old days at Auntie’s were all wrong and twisted somehow, and here—­” She indicated the house with a shudder.  “I feel stifled here!” she said.  “But—­but if there is really some place where people are good and simple, whether they’re rich or poor, and honest, and hard-working—­ I want to go there!  We’ll have books and music, and a garden,” she went on hurriedly, and he felt that the hands in his were hot, “and we’ll live so far away from all this sort of thing, that we’ll forget it and they’ll forget us!  I would rather,” Susan’s eyes grew wistful, “I would rather have a garden where my babies could make mud-pies and play, then be married to Kenneth Saunders in the Cathedral with ten brides-maids!”

Perhaps something in the last sentence stirred him to sudden compunction.

“You know that it means going away with me, little girl?” he asked.

“No, it doesn’t mean that,” she answered honestly.  “I could go back to Auntie, I suppose.  I could wait!” “I’ve been thinking of that,” he said, seriously.  “I want you to listen to me.  I have been half planning a trip to Japan, Susan, I want to take you with me.  We’ll loiter through the Orient—­that makes your eyes dance, my little Irishwoman; but wait until you are really there; no books and no pictures do it justice!  We’ll go to India, and you shall see the Taj Mahal—­all lovers ought to see it!”

“And the great desert—­” Susan said dreamily.

“And the great desert.  We’ll come home by Italy and France, and we’ll go to London.  And while we’re there, I will correspond with Lillian, or Lillian’s lawyer.  There will be no reason then why she should hold me.”

“You mean,” said Susan, scarlet-cheeked, “that—­that just my going with you will be sufficient cause?”

“It is the only ground on which she would,” he assented, watching her, “that she could, in fact.”  Susan stared thoughtfully out of the window.  “Then,” he took up the narrative, “then we stay a few months in London, are quietly married there,—­or, better yet, sail at once for home, and are married in some quiet little Jersey town, say, and then—­then I bring home the loveliest bride in the world!  No one need know that our trip around the world was not completely chaperoned.  No one will ask questions.  You shall have your circle—­”

“But I thought you were not going to Japan until the serial rights of the novel were sold?” Susan temporized.

For answer he took a letter from his pocket, and with her own eyes she read an editor’s acceptance of the new novel for what seemed to her a fabulous sum.  No argument could have influenced her as the single typewritten sheet did.  Why should she not trust this man, whom all the world admired and trusted?  Heart and mind were reconciled now; Susan’s eyes, when they were raised to his, were full of shy adoration and confidence.