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
gratitude.

"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 attitude. 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,