, offer you a home, such as it is," repeated the man. "Choose!"

At the mention of the home for which means were so quickly forthcoming
when Thorpe, not she, considered it needful, the girl's eyes flashed.
She stooped and dragged violently from beneath the bed a flat steamer
trunk, the lid of which she threw open. A dress lay on the bed. With a
fine dramatic gesture she folded the garment and laid it in the bottom
of the trunk. Then she knelt, and without vouchsafing another glance at
her brother standing rigid by the door, she began feverishly to arrange
the folds.

The choice was made. He turned and went out.

Chapter XXXIV

With Thorpe there could be no half-way measure. He saw that the rupture
with his sister was final, and the thrust attained him in one of his few
unprotected points. It was not as though he felt either himself or his
sister consciously in the wrong. He acquitted her of all fault, except
as to the deadly one of misreading and misunderstanding. The fact argued
not a perversion but a lack in her character. She was other than he had
thought her.

As for himself, he had schemed, worked, lived only for her. He had come
to her from the battle expecting rest and refreshment. To the world he
had shown the hard, unyielding front of the unemotional; he had looked
ever keenly outward; he had braced his muscles in the constant tension
of endeavor. So much the more reason why, in the hearts of the few he
loved, he, the man of action, should find repose; the man of sternness,
should discover that absolute peace of the spirit in which not the
slightest motion of the will is necessary, the man of repression should
be permitted affectionate, care-free expansion of the natural affection,
of the full sympathy which will understand and not mistake for weakness.
Instead of this, he was forced into refusing where he would rather have
given; into denying where he would rather have assented; and finally
into commanding where he longed most ardently to lay aside the cloak of
authority. His motives were misread; his intentions misjudged; his love
doubted.

But worst of all, Thorpe's mind could see no possibility of an
explanation. If she could not see of her own accord how much he loved
her, surely it was a hopeless task to attempt an explanation through
mere words. If, after all, she was capable of misconceiving the entire
set of his motives during the past two years, expostulation would be
futile. In his thoug