“Do you want to drag my daughter down with you?” cried Mrs. Kilgour.

“You’d better not talk about dragging down,” he shouted, passionately.  “I didn’t steal for myself.  Give me your love, Kate!  Give me yourself to encourage me, and I’ll get out of the scrape somehow.  I’ll find ways.  But if you don’t come with me I won’t have the courage or the desire to fight my way through.  I’ll not disgrace you if you marry me—­I swear I will not!  With you to protect from everything I’ll make good.  Symonds Dodd is my uncle.  He won’t see the family name pulled in.  But you must marry me!”

“And if I do not?” she asked.

“We’ll all go to damnation together.  I don’t care!  I’ll blow it all.  I won’t be disgraced alone because of something I did for your mother.  I may sound like a cur.  I don’t care, I say!  I’m going to have you, and I don’t care how I get you!”

“We need not be so dramatic,” said the girl.  Some wonderful influence seemed to be controlling her.  “Mother, stop your noise and go and sit in that chair.  You demand, do you, Mr. Dodd, that to save my mother from exposure as a woman who has stolen, I must be your wife?”

“I do.”

“Do you really want a wife who has been won in that fashion?”

“I want you.”

“You realize, fully, don’t you, the spirit in which I shall marry you?”

“We’ll take care of that matter after we are married, Kate.  You have liked me.  You will care for me more when you come to your senses in this thing.”

“You remember what my father did in the way of sacrifice, I suppose?  It was no secret in this state.”

“Yes,” he muttered, abashed under her steady gaze.

“I am like my father in many ways—­in many of my thoughts.  Perhaps if he had not set me such an example in the way of sacrifice I should say something else to you, Mr. Dodd.  But as the matter stands between us, considering the demand you make on me, I will marry you.”

The concession was flung at him so suddenly—­he had expected so much more of rebellion—­that he staggered where he stood.  He advanced toward her.  But she waved him back.

“Sit down!” she commanded.  “This matter has gone far outside romance.  It has become one of business.  It is a matter of barter.  I have had some experience in business.  You say that mother owes you five thousand dollars which you took from the state treasury?”

“Yes, Kate.”

“And your books will be examined very carefully, of course, if there is an overturn in your office?”

“Yes.  It won’t be any mere legislative auditing.”

“I know something about politics as well as about business, Mr. Dodd.  I cannot very well help knowing, after my experience in your uncle’s office.  I suppose the next state convention will determine pretty effectually whether there will be an overturn or not?”

“If we renominate Harwood it ought to give us a good line on the control of the next legislature,” he told her.  “A hobo and a goody-goody,” he added, with scorn, “think they have stirred up a revolution, but they have another think coming.”  He had been calmed by her outwardly matter-of-fact acceptance of the situation.  But he did not perceive the fires of her soul gleaming deep in her eyes.