“Then you haven’t heard!” she cried, clasping her hands.  “Oh, Frank, you haven’t heard!”

“I have only just got back,” he said.

“I’ve been left heaps of money,” she exclaimed, “from my uncle, you know, the one that treated father so badly and tricked him out of the old manor farm.  I hardly knew he existed till he died.  And it’s not only a lot, Frank, but it’s millions!”

He repeated the word with a kind of groan.

“They are probating the will for six,” she went on, not noticing his agitation, “but I’m sure the lawyers are making it as low as they can for the taxes.  And it’s the most splendid kind of property—­rows of houses in the heart of New York and big Broadway shops and skyscrapers!  Frank, do you realise I own two office buildings twenty stories high?”

Frank tried to congratulate her on her wonderful good fortune, but it was like a voice from the grave and he could not affect to be glad at the death-knell of all his hopes.

“That lets me out,” he said.

“My poor Frank, you never were in,” she said, regarding him with great kindness and compassion.  “I know you are disappointed, but you are too much a man to be unjust to me.”

“Oh, I haven’t the right to say a word!” he exclaimed quickly.  “On your side it was friends and nothing more.  I always understood that, Florence.”

He was shocked at her almost imperceptible sigh of relief.

“Of course, this changes everything,” she said.

“Yet it would have come if it hadn’t been for this,” he said.  “You were getting to like me better and better.  You cried when I last went away.  Yes, it would have come, Florence,” he repeated, looking at her wistfully.

“I suppose it would, Frank,” she said.

“Oh, Florence!” he exclaimed, and could not go on lest his voice should betray him.

“And we should have lived in a poky little house,” she said, “and you would have been to sea three-quarters of the time, leaving me to eat my heart out as mother did for father—­and it would have been a horrible, dreadful, irrevocable mistake.”

“I didn’t have to go to sea,” he said, snatching at this crumb of hope.  “There are other jobs than ships.  Why, only last trip I was offered a refrigerating plant in Chicago!”

He did not tell her it bore a salary of four hundred dollars a month and that he had meant to lay it at her feet that morning.  In the light of her millions that sum, so considerable an hour before, had suddenly shrunk to nothing.  How puny and pitiful it seemed in the contrast.  He had a sense that everything had shrunk to nothing—­his life, his hopes, his future.

“I know you think I am cruel,” she said, in the same calm, considerate tone she had used throughout.  “But I never gave you any encouragement, Frank—­not in the way you wanted or expected.  You were the only person I knew who was the least bit cultivated and nice and travelled and out of the commonplace.  I can’t tell you how much you brightened my life here, or how glad I was when you came or how sorry I was when you went away—­but it wasn’t love, Frank—­not the love you wished for or the love I feel I have the power to give.”