Eve—­her eyes still wide, her face pained and alarmed —­withdrew her hands from his shoulders.  “You mean,” she said, with difficulty, “that it is going to end?  That you are going away?  That you are giving everything up?  Oh, but you can’t!  You can’t!” she exclaimed, with sudden excitement, her fears suddenly overmastering her incredulity.  “You can’t!  You mustn’t!  The only proof that could have interfered—­”

“I wasn’t thinking of the proof.”

“Then of what?  Of what?”

Loder was silent for a moment.  “Of our love,” he said, steadily.

She colored deeply.  “But why?” she stammered; “why?  We have done no wrong.  We need do no wrong.  We would be friends—­nothing more; and I—­oh, I so need a friend!”

For almost the first time in Loder’s knowledge of her, her voice broke, her control deserted her.  She stood before him in all the pathos of her lonely girlhood—­her empty life.

The revelation touched him with sudden poignancy; the real strength that lay beneath his faults, the chivalry buried under years of callousness, stirred at the birth of a new emotion.  The resolution preserved at such a cost, the sacrifice that had seemed wellnigh impossible, all at once took on a different shape.  What before had been a barren duty became suddenly a sacred right.  Holding out his arms, he drew her to him as if she had been a child.

“Eve,” he said, gently, “I have learned to-night how fully a woman’s life is at the mercy of the world—­and how scanty that mercy is.  If circumstances had been different, I believe—­I am convinced—­I would have made you a good husband—­would have used my right to protect you as well as a man could use it.  And now that things are different, I want—­I should like—­” He hesitated a very little.  “Now that I have no right to protect you—­except the right my love gives—­I want to guard you as closely from all that is sordid as any husband could guard his wife.

“In life there are really only two broad issues—­right and wrong.  Whatever we may say, whatever we may profess to believe, we know that our action is always a choice between right and wrong.  A month ago—­a week ago—­I would have despised a man who could talk like this—­and have thought myself strong for despising him.  Now I know that strength is something more than the trampling of others into the dust that we ourselves may have a clear road; that it is something much harder and much less triumphant than that—­that it is standing aside to let somebody else pass on.  Eve,” he exclaimed, suddenly, “I’m trying to do this for you.  Don’t you see?  Don’t you understand?  The easy course, the happy course, would be to let things drift.  Every instinct is calling to me to take that course—­to go on as I have gone, trading on Chilcote’s weakness and your generosity.  But I won’t do it!  I can’t do it!” With a swift impulse he loosed his arms and held her away from him.  “Eve, it’s the first time I have put another human being before myself!”