ght at his arm and clung to it, as though it were her last
earthly pillar of support. Her huge plaited ropes of hair had fallen
down, thick brown ropes longer than his own arms, and he, breathing
hard, had sat back and watched them as she wept.

But Blake was neither analytical nor introspective. How it came about
he never quite knew. He felt, after his blind and inarticulate
fashion, that this scene of theirs, that this official assault and
surrender, was in some way associated with the climacteric transports
of camp-meeting evangelism, that it involved strange nerve-centers
touched on in rhapsodic religions, that it might even resemble the
final emotional surrender of reluctant love itself to the first
aggressive tides of passion. What it was based on, what it arose from,
he could not say. But in the flood-tide of his own tumultuous conquest
he had watched her abandoned weeping and her tumbled brown hair. And
as he watched, a vague and troubling tingle sped like a fuse-sputter
along his limbs, and fired something dormant and dangerous in the great
hulk of a body which had never before been stirred by its explosion of
emotion. It was not pity, he knew; for pity was something quite
foreign to his nature. Yet as she lay back, limp and forlorn against
his shoulder, sobbing weakly out that she wanted to be a good woman,
that she could be honest if they would only give her a chance, he felt
that thus to hold her, to shield her, was something desirable.

She had stared, weary and wide-eyed, as his head had bent closer down
over hers. She had drooped back, bewildered and unresponsive, as his
heavy lips had closed on hers that were still wet and salty with tears.
When she had left the office, at the end of that strange hour, she had
gone with the promise of his protection.

The sobering light of day, with its cynic relapse to actualities, might
have left that promise a worthless one, had not the prompt evidence of
Sheldon's suicide come to hand. This made Blake's task easier than he
had expected. The movement against Elsie Verriner was "smothered" at
Headquarters. Two days later she met Blake by appointment. That day,
for the first time in his life, he gave flowers to a woman.

Two weeks later he startled her with the declaration that he wanted to
marry her. He did n't care about her past. She 'd been dragged into
the things she 'd done without understanding them, at first, and she 'd
kept on because there 'd