feel humble toward you, for having misled you. But it is
better that you--and I--should have found out now than too late."

"It _is_ too late--too late to go back."

"Would you wish to marry a woman who does not love you, who loves some
one else, and who tells you so and refuses to marry you?" She had
tried to concentrate enough scorn into her voice to hide her fear.

"I would," said I. "And I shall. I'll not desert you, Anita, when your
courage and strength fail. I will carry you on to safety."

"I tell you I cannot marry you," she cried, between appeal and
command. "There are reasons--I may not tell you. But if I might, you
would--would take me to my uncle's. I cannot marry you!"

"That is what conventionality bids you say now," I replied. "But what
will it bid you say to-morrow morning, as we drive down crowded Fifth
Avenue, after a night in this brougham?"

I could not see her, for she drew back into the darkness as sharply as
if I had struck her with all my force full in the face. But I could
feel the effect of my words upon her. I paused, not because I expected
or wished an answer, but because I had to steady myself--myself, not
my purpose; my purpose was inflexible. I would put through what we had
begun, just as I would have held her and cut off her arm with my
pocketknife if we had been cast away alone, and I had had to do it to
save her life. She was not competent to decide for herself. Every
problem that had ever faced her had been decided by others for her.
Who but me could decide for her now? I longed to plead with her, to
show her how I was suffering; but I dared not. "She would
misunderstand," said I to myself. "She would think you were
weakening."

Full fifteen minutes of that frightful silence before she said: "I
will go where you wish." And she said it in a tone which makes me
wince as I recall it now.

I called my partner's address up through the tube. Again that
frightful silence, then she was trying to choke back the sobs. A few
words I caught: "They have broken my will--they have broken my will."

Ball lived in a big, graystone house that stood apart and commanded a
noble view of the Hudson and the Palisades. It was, in the main, a
reproduction of a French chateau, and such changes as the architect
had made in his model were not positively disfiguring, though amusing.
There should have been trees and shrubbery about it, but--"As Mrs. B.
says," Joe had explained to me, "what's the use of s