thousand times as
much as I was, that I'd be fed by the hand of one to whom I had given a
pledge and broken it? Do you think that I'd give her the chance to say,
or not to say, but only think, 'I forgive you; I will give you your food
and clothes and board and bed, but if you are not good in the future, I
will be very, very angry with you'? Do you think--?"

His face was flaming now. The pent-up flood of remorse and resentment
and pride and love--the love that tore itself in pieces because it
had not the pride and self-respect which independence as to money
gives--broke forth in him, fresh as he was from a brutal interview with
the financial clique whom he had given the chance to make much money,
and who were now, for a few thousand dollars, trying to cudgel him out
of his one opportunity to regain his place in his lost world.

"I live--I live like this," he continued, with a gesture that embraced
the room where they were, "and I have one room to myself where I have
lived over four years"--he pointed towards it. "Do you think I would
choose this and all it means--its poverty and its crudeness, its
distance from all I ever had and all my people had, if I could have
stood the other thing--a pauper taking pennies from his own wife? I had
had taste enough of it while I had a little something left; but when
I lost everything on Flamingo, and I was a beggar, I knew I could not
stand the whole thing. I could not, would not, go under the poor-law
and accept you, with the lash of a broken pledge in your hand, as my
guardian. So that's why I left, and that's why I stay here, and that's
why I'm going to stay here, Mona."

He looked at her firmly, though his face had that illumination which
the spirit in his eyes--the Celtic fire drawn through the veins of his
ancestors--gave to all he did and felt; and now as in a dream he saw
little things in her he had never seen before. He saw that a little
strand of her beautiful dark hair had broken away from its ordered
place and hung prettily against the rosy, fevered skin of her cheek just
beside her ear. He saw that there were no rings on her fingers save one,
and that was her wedding-ring--and she had always been fond of wearing
rings. He noted, involuntarily, that in her agitation the white tulle
at her bosom had been disturbed into pretty disarray, and that there was
neither brooch nor necklace at her breast or throat.

"If you stay, I am going to stay too," she declared in an almo