quantity was to push him harder than any word of her own
could warn him. All that she was herself, moreover, was so lighted, to
its advantage, by the pink glow. He wasn't rabid, but he wasn't either,
as a man of a proper spirit, to be frightened. "What is that then--if
I accept it--but as strong a reason as I can want for just LEARNING to
know you?"

She faced him always--kept it up as for honesty, and yet at the same
time, in her odd way, as for mercy. "How can you tell whether if you did
you would?"

It was ambiguous for an instant, as she showed she felt. "I mean when
it's a question of learning, one learns sometimes too late."

"I think it's a question," he promptly enough made answer, "of liking
you the more just for your saying these things. You should make
something," he added, "of my liking you."

"I make everything. But are you sure of having exhausted all other
ways?"

This, of a truth, enlarged his gaze. "But what other ways?"

"Why, you've more ways of being kind than anyone I ever knew."

"Take it then," he answered, "that I'm simply putting them all together
for you." She looked at him, on this, long again--still as if it
shouldn't be said she hadn't given him time or had withdrawn from his
view, so to speak, a single inch of her surface. This at least she was
fully to have exposed. It represented her as oddly conscientious, and he
scarce knew in what sense it affected him. On the whole, however, with
admiration. "You're very, very honourable."

"It's just what I want to be. I don't see," she added, "why you're
not right, I don't see why you're not happy, as you are. I can not ask
myself, I can not ask YOU," she went on, "if you're really as much at
liberty as your universal generosity leads you to assume. Oughtn't
we," she asked, "to think a little of others? Oughtn't I, at least,
in loyalty--at any rate in delicacy--to think of Maggie?" With which,
intensely gentle, so as not to appear too much to teach him his duty,
she explained. "She's everything to you--she has always been. Are you so
certain that there's room in your life--?"

"For another daughter?--is that what you mean?" She had not hung upon it
long, but he had quickly taken her up.

He had not, however, disconcerted her. "For another young woman--very
much of her age, and whose relation to her has always been so different
from what our marrying would make it. For another companion," said
Charlotte Stant.

"Can't a man be, all his