Steve firmly. "He is not a good man."

"And he's awfully ugly, too, but he's rich, and he's one of the swell
set. Ugh! but I do hate him!"

"Why are you going to marry him?"

"Why?" she asked, looking at him with straight, frank surprise. "I've
got to. Nobody else wants me."

The pettish look had passed from her face; so also had the world-wise
expression. There was something in her present naive frankness that
prevented it from seeming bold.

As he looked at her swift images of love and marriage flitted across
his brain. Somehow his loneliness was borne in upon him, and with this
realization there came as a sudden flash the consciousness that he
could marry. Long ago he had put all this one side, and in his grief
over the loss of mother and sister it had never once occurred to him
that he was free. The knowledge almost overwhelmed him now, and in his
bewilderment for the moment he lost sight of his ideal. Like most
reticent men, he cherished an ideal. Since meeting Constance Leigh,
unconsciously to himself that ideal had grown very like her. But now
he was sitting beside a fascinating young girl--for fascinating she
was to Steve, even in her brusqueness and plainness of speech; a mere
child, as it were, who was without home and without the protection of
love and parental care, and as he looked into her eyes, still wet with
tears, he felt his heart go out to her.

"Listen to me, Nannie," he said, taking her hand once more. "I am a
very lonely man. I need a wife----"

"Come, ducky, come and be killed," flashed through Nannie's mind.

"I think you need me and I'm sure I need you."

"How?" thought Nannie; "fricasseed or boiled?"

"If you would let me I would take you and try----"

"Fry, you mean," said Nannie mentally as he hesitated.

Then with a sudden whirl, peculiar to her gusty temperament, she said
to herself:

"He's proposing, and I needn't marry that hideous creature!"

She caught her breath and pressed her hands together.

"Oh, if only I could escape from Joe Harding!" she exclaimed.

Something very holy in Steve's nature came up then and changed the
man. No longer shy, no longer reserved, he bent toward Nannie without
touching her and said:

"My dear, marriage is a gate at once solemn and beautiful. When it is
used as a door of escape it opens into a dark forest abounding with
terrible wild beasts and hideous crawling things, but if one opens it
with love's key, I can't tell you what it leads