It took no longer for all that to go through her mind than Graham needed for his little explanatory speech on the door-step. There he stood waiting for her answer. The only choice she had was between shutting the door in his face without a word, or graciously inviting him to come in and propose to her--for the last time, at all events. It was not, of course, a choice at all.

"I'm afraid it's a terribly hot day for tea," she said, moving back from the doorway to make room for him to come in. "Wallace likes it, though. I might make you something cold if only I had ice, but of course there isn't any in the house. It's nice and cool, though, isn't it; from having been shut up so long?"

Anything,--any frantic thing that could be spun into words to cover the fact that she had no welcome for him at all, not even the most wan little beam of friendly tenderness. She had seen the hurt look come into his eyes, incipient panic at the flash of anger which had not been meant for him. She must float him inside, somehow, and anchor him to the tea table.

There she could get herself together and deal with him--decently.

He came along, tractably enough, sat in the chair that was to have been Wallace's, and talked for a while of the tea, and how hot it was this afternoon, and how beautifully cool in here. It was hot, too, out at Hickory Hill but one thought little of it. The air was drier for one thing. He and Rush had commented on the difference as they drove in to-day.

"Oh, Rush came in with you, did he?" she observed.

He flushed and stammered over the admission and it was easy to guess why.

The fact that her brother, as well as Wallace, was lurking in the background somewhere waiting for results gave an official cast to his call that was rather--asinine. She came to the rescue.

"I suppose he and Wallace had something they wanted to talk about," she commented easily, and he made haste to a.s.sent.

She steadied herself with a breath. "Did Wallace tell you," she asked, "about our explosion at Ravinia over Paula's new contract? And how furious both father and Paula are with me about it? And how I'm out looking for a job? He didn't say anything about his sister, did he; whether he'd written to her to-day or not?"

"Not whether he'd written. But he told us the rest. How you wanted to go to work. As a nursery governess."

He paused there but she did not break in upon it. She had given him all the lead he needed. With the deliberate care that a suddenly tremulous hand made necessary he put down his teacup and spoke as if addressing it.

"I think you're the bravest--most wonderful person in the world. Of course, I've known that always. Not just since I came back last spring.

But this, that Mr. Hood told us this afternoon, somehow--caps the climax.

I can't tell you how it--got me, to think of your being ready to do--a thing like that."

The last thing she would have done voluntarily was to put any obstacles in his way. Her program, on the contrary was to help him along all she could to his declaration, make a refusal that should be as gentle as was consistent with complete finality, and then get rid of him before anything regrettably--messy ensued. But to have her courage rhapsodized over like this was a thing she could not endure.

"It's nothing," she said rather dryly, "beyond what most girls do nowadays as a matter of course. I'm being rather cowardly about it, I think--on account of some silly ideas I've been more or less brought up with perhaps, but..."

"What if they do?" he broke in; "thousands of them at the stores and in the offices. It's bad enough for them--for any sort of woman. But it's different with you. It's horrible. You aren't like them."

She tried to check herself but couldn't. "What's the difference? I'm healthy and half-educated and fairly young. I have the same sort, pretty much, of thoughts and feelings. I don't believe I like being clean and warm and well-fed and amused and admired any better than the average girl does. I ought to have found a job months ago, instead of letting Rush bring me home from New York. Or else gone to work when I came home. But every one was so horrified..."

"They were right to be," he interrupted. "It is a horrible idea. Because you aren't like the others. You _haven't_ the same sort of thoughts and feelings. A person doesn't have to be in love with you to see that. Your father and Rush and Mr. Hood all see it. And as for me--well, I couldn't endure it, that's all. Oh, I know, you can act like anybody else; laugh and dance and talk nonsense and make a person forget sometimes. But the other thing is there all the while--shining through--oh, it can't be talked about!--like a light. Of--of something a decent man _wants_ to be guided by, whatever he does. And for you to go out into the world with that, where there can't be any protection at all ... I can't stand it, Mary. That's why I came to-day instead of Mr. Hood."

She went very white during that speech and tears came up into her eyes.

Tears of helpless exasperation. It was such a cruelly inhuman thing to impose an ideal like that upon a woman. It was so smug, so utterly satisfactory to all romantic sentimentalists. Wallace would approve every word of it. Wallace had sent him to say just this;--was waiting now to be told the good news of his success.

The fact is worth recalling, perhaps, that away back in her childhood Wallace had sometimes reduced her to much this sort of frantic exasperation by his impregnable a.s.sumption that she was the white-souled little angel she looked. Sitting here in this very room he had goaded her into committing freakish misdemeanors.

She was resisting now an impulse of much the same sort, though the parallel did not, of course, occur to her. It was just a sort of inexplicable panic which she was reining in with all her might by telling herself how fond she really was of Graham and how terrible a thing it would be if she hurt him unnecessarily. She dared not attempt to speak so she merely waited. She was sitting relaxed, her head lowered, her chin supported by one hand. This stillness and relaxation she always resorted to in making any supreme demand upon her self-control.

He looked at her rather helplessly once or twice during the silence. Then arose and moved about restlessly.

"I know you don't love me. I've gone on hoping you could after I suppose I might have seen it wasn't possible. You've tried to and you can't. I don't know if one as white as you could love any man--that way. Well, I'm not going to ask any more for that. I want to ask, instead, that we be friends. I haven't spoiled the possibility of that, have I?"

She was taken utterly by surprise. It didn't seem possible that she had even heard aright and the face he turned to, as he asked that last question, was of one pitiably bewildered, yet lighted too by a gleam of grat.i.tude.

"You really mean that, Graham?" she asked in a very ragged voice. "Is that what you came to-day to tell me?"

"I mean it altogether," he said earnestly. "I mean it without any--reservations at all. You must believe that because it's the--basis for everything else."

She repeated "everything else?" in clear interrogation; then dropped back rather suddenly into her former att.i.tude. Everything else! What else was there to friendship but itself?

He turned back to the window. "I've come to ask you to, marry me, Mary, just the same. I couldn't be any good as a friend, couldn't take care of you and try to make you happy, unless in the eyes of the world I was your husband. But I wouldn't ask,--I promise you I wouldn't ask anything,--anything at all. You do understand, don't you? You'd be just as--sacred to me ..."

Then he cried out in consternation at the sight of her, "Mary!

What is it?"

The tension had become too great, that was all. Her self-control, slackened by the momentarily held belief that it was not needed, had snapped.

"I understand well enough," she said. "You would say good night at my bedroom door and good morning at the breakfast table. I've read of arrangements like that in rather nasty-minded novels, but I didn't suppose they existed anywhere else. I can't think of an existence more degradingly sensual than that;--to go on for days and months and years being 'sacred' to a man; never satisfying the desires your nearness tortured him with--to say nothing of what you did with your own!

"But that such a thing should be offered to me because I'm too good to love a man honestly.... You see, I'm none of the things you think I am, Graham. Nor that you want me to be. Not white, not innocent. Not a 'good'

woman even, let alone an angel. That's what makes it so--preposterous."

He had been staring at her, speechless, horrified. But at this it was as if he understood. "I ought not to have worried you to-day," he said, suddenly gentle. "I know how terribly overwrought you are. I meant--I only meant to make things easier. I'm going away now. I'll send Rush to you. He'll come at once. Do you mind being alone till then?"

She answered slowly and with an appearance of patient reasonableness, "It's not that. It's not what Rush calls sh.e.l.l-shock. There is many a shabby little experimental flirt who has managed to keep intact an-innocence which I don't possess. That is the simple-physiological truth."

Then, after a silence, with a gasp, "I'm not mad. But I think I shall be if you go on looking at me like that. Won't you please go?"

CHAPTER XXIII

THE TERROR

Graham Stannard made his well-meant but disastrous proposal to Mary at half past five or so on a Friday afternoon. It was a little more than twenty-four hours later, just after dark on Sat.u.r.day evening, that she came in, unheralded, more incredibly like a vision than ever, upon Anthony March in his secret lair above the grocery.

He was sitting at his work-table scoring a pa.s.sage in the third act of _The Dumb Princess_ for the wood-wind choir when her knock, faint as it was, breaking in upon the rhythm of his theme, caused his pen to leap away from the paper and his heart to skip a beat. But had it actually been a knock upon his door? Such an event was unlikely enough.

He uttered a tentative and rather incredulous "Come in" as one just awakened speaks, humoring the illusion of a dream.

But the door opened and the Dumb Princess stood there, pallid, wistful, just as she had looked before her true lover climbed the precarious ivy to her tower and tore away the spell that veiled her.

March sat debating with himself,--or so it seemed to him afterward; it was a matter of mere seconds, of course,--why, since she was a vision, did she not look as she had on one of the occasions when he had seen her.

The night of the Whitman songs; the blazing afternoon in the hay field.

She was different to-night, and very clearly defined, in a plain little frock of dark blue--yet not quite what one ordinarily meant by dark blue--cut out in an unsoftened square around the neck, and a small hat of straw, the color of the warmer sort of bronze. These austerities of garb, dissociated utterly with all his memories, gave her a poignancy that was almost unbearable. Why had the vision of her come to him like that?

She smiled then and spoke. "It is really I. I've come with a message for you."

Until she spoke he could do nothing but stare as one would at an hallucinatory vision; but her voice, the first articulate syllable of it, brought him to his feet and drew him across the room to where she stood.

He was almost suffocated by a sudden convulsion of the heart, half exultation, half terror. The exultation was accountable enough. The high G.o.ds had given him another chance. Why he should be terrified he did not at the time know, but he was--from that very first moment.