us comfort if I might be counting the days or the weeks. Are you
still finding it impossible to set the limit?"

She nodded slowly, and he took the next step like a man feeling his way in
the dark.

"That is as large an answer as you have ever given me, I think. Is there
any speakable reason?"

"You know the reason," she said, looking away from him.

"I am not sure that I do. Is it because the moneygods have been
unpropitious--because these robber barons have looted your railroad?"

"No; that is only part of it--the smallest part."

"I hoped so: if you have too little, I have a good bit too much. But that
corners it in a way to make me sorry. I am not keeping my promise to win
what you weren't able to give me at first."

"Please don't put it that way. If there be any fault, it is mine. You have
left nothing undone."

The man of expedients ran over his cards reflectively and decided that the
moment for playing his long suit was fully come.

"Your goodness of heart excuses me where I am to blame," he qualified. "I
am coming to believe that I have defeated my own cause."

"By being too good to me?" she suggested.

"No; by running where I should have been content to walk; by shackling you
with a promise, and so in a certain sense becoming your jailer. That is
putting it rather clumsily, but isn't it true?"

"I had never thought of it in that light," she said unresponsively.

"You wouldn't, naturally. But the fact remains. It has wrenched your point
of view hopelessly aside, don't you think? I have seen it and felt it all
along, but I haven't had the courage of my convictions."

"In what way?" she asked.

"In the only way the thing can be stood squarely upon its feet. It's
hard--desperately hard; and hardest of all for a man of my peculiar build.
I am no longer what you would call a young man, Elinor, and I have never
learned to turn back and begin all over again with any show of heartiness.
They used to say of me in the Yacht Club that if I gained a half-length in
a race, I'd hold it if it took the sticks out of my boat."

"I know," she assented absently.

"Well, it's the same way now. But for your sake--or rather for the sake of
my love--I am going to turn back for once. You are free again, Elinor. All
I ask is that you will let me begin where I left off somewhere on the road
between here and Boston last fall."

She sat with clasped hands looking steadily at the darkened windows of the
opposite house,