Her eyes gleamed.  So!  She had him at her mercy!

“Not so fast, young lady,” continued he in answer to that gleam.  “It is equally true that you’ve got to marry me.”

“But I shall not!” she cried.  “Besides, it isn’t true.”

“It is true,” replied he.  “You may refuse to marry me, just as a man may refuse to run when the dynamite blast is going off.  Yes, you can refuse, but—­you’d not be your grandmother’s granddaughter if you did.”

“Really!” She was so surcharged with rage that she was shaking with it, was tearing up her handkerchief in her lap.

“Yes, indeed,” he assured her, tranquil as a lawyer arguing a commercial case before a logic-machine of a judge.  “If you do not marry me all your friends will say I jilted you.  I needn’t tell you what it would mean in your set, what it would mean as to your matrimonial prospects, for you to have the reputation of having been turned down by me—­need I?”

She was silent; her head down, her lips compressed, her fingers fiercely interlaced with the ruins of her handkerchief.

“It is necessary that you marry,” said he summing up.  “It is wisest and easiest to marry me, since I am willing.  To refuse would be to inflict an irreparable injury upon yourself in order to justify a paltry whim for injuring me.”

She laughed harshly.  “You are frank,” said she.

“I am paying you the compliment of frankness.  I am appealing to your intelligence, where a less intelligent man and one that knew you less would try to gain his point by chicane, flattery, deception.”

“Yes—­it is a compliment,” she answered.  “It was stupid of me to sneer at your frankness.”

A long silence.  He lighted a cigarette, smoked it with deliberation foreign to his usual self but characteristic of him when he was closely and intensely engaged; for he was like a thoroughbred that is all fret and champ and pawing and caper until the race is on, when he at once settles down into a calm, steady stride, with all the surplus nervous energy applied directly and intelligently to the work in hand.  She was not looking at him, but she was feeling him in every atom of her body, was feeling the power, the inevitableness of the man.  He angered her, made her feel weak, a helpless thing, at his mercy.  True, it was his logic that was convincing her, not his magnetic and masterful will; but somehow the two seemed one.  Never had he been so repellent, never had she felt so hostile to him.

“I will marry you,” she finally said.  “But I must tell you that I do not love you—­or even like you.  The reverse.”

His face, of the large, hewn features, with their somehow pathetic traces of the struggles and sorrows of his rise, grew strange, almost terrible.  “Do you mean that?” he said, turning slowly toward her.

She quickly shifted her eyes, in which her dislike was showing, shifted them before he could possibly have seen.  And she tried in vain to force past her lips the words which she believed to be the truth, the words his pathetic, powerful face told her would end everything.  Yes, she knew he would not marry her if she told him the truth about her feelings.