told. He said I would regret not having
taken the check."

"Did he threaten you?"

"Well, he said that I would have to leave town."

"He is afraid of you, and he knows it."

"If he is, he ought to know it," Lyman drolly replied. "If he doesn't
know it, somebody ought to tell him. But I won't go away and leave you
unprotected."

She looked at him gratefully. "How strange it sounds, and yet how true
it is that you are my only real protector. My father cannot understand
why I don't place Mr. Sawyer's money-getting ability above everything
else. He thinks Mr. Sawyer will become one of the greatest men in the
country. And I admit that at times this, together with father's
entreaty, has had a strong influence over me. But I don't think," she
added, shaking her head, "that I could ever have married that man.
No," she said energetically, as she pointed across the stream, "that
rock, first."

"You wouldn't do that," Lyman replied.

"Wouldn't I? Don't we read every day of women who kill themselves?"

"Yes, of women whose minds are not sound."

"But who shall say when a mind is not sound? How do you know that it
is? What proof have I? We often read that no one suspected that Miss
So-and-So had the slightest intention of destroying herself. Well, I
may be a Miss So-and-So."

"I have no right to doubt your word," said Lyman. "Things that we most
doubt sometimes come to pass, and then we wonder why we should have
questioned them. But I will stand between you and the rock; I will be
your friend and confidant, your brother, let us say. You must keep
faith with me, and if you ever really fall in love, the sweet,
torturing, the desperate sort of love which must exist, come to me and
tell me."

"I will keep faith. But why do you say the sweet and torturing and
desperate love that must exist? You talk as if it was a speculation of
the mind rather than a fact of the heart. Don't you know that it does
exist? Was there not a woman in the past who aroused it within you?"

"I have seen one or two women who might have done so. I remember one
particularly. I was young and foolish, of course, but as I looked at
her I thought she could win my soul. I did not know her; I saw her
only once and that was at a hotel in the White Mountains. She and a
party of ladies and gentlemen dined at the hotel, and I was a waiter."
She looked up at him. "Yes, a waiter, with a white apron on and a
Greek Testament in my pocket. The employment was meni