d spoke gently:

"Before we talk of anything else, dear, there's a question I must ask
you, and you must answer it in one word--yes, or no. You'll want to say
more, and afterwards you may--but not at first." She paused, and a note
of apology crept into the voice that went on again: "I feel disloyal
even to ask it, but it's a thing I'm pledged to do, and I'll explain the
reason afterwards."

Boone smiled with the confidence of a man for whom the witness stand
holds no terror.

"Ask it, dearest."

"Did you ... ever"--she faltered a moment, then went hurriedly on, as if
racing against a failure of resolve--"ask ... any other girl ... to
marry you?"

The smile was struck from his face in an instant, leaving his eyes
pained and his lips straight and tight, and her gaze, fixed on his, read
the swift change of expression and responded with a sudden terror in her
own pupils.

"I was never ... in love with any one...!"

"One word!" Her interruption came in a tone he had never heard her use
before. It was so quiet that it carried with it a chill like that of
death. "Yes or no."

Boone felt a cold moisture on his hands and temples. A matter easy to
explain had, of a sudden, become inexplicable. Looking back over lapsed
years, all the quixotic urging of a false sense of justice had gone out
of conduct which had then seemed so mandatory. The inescapable
obligation to which he had responded seemed empty and twisted now. He
could see only that he had insulted Happy with a half offer and been
false to his avowed love of Anne and to his duty to himself.

That, at the time, he had been groping toward a callow and half-baked
conception of honour failed now to extenuate his blunder, and if he
himself could no longer understand it, how could he hope to make her do
so?

His voice came in a dull monotone.

"Yes," he said, "I did. May I explain?"

In the credo of this girl's life fairness and generosity were twin
cornerstones, and condemnation without hearing was an abhorrent and mean
injustice. But the unadmitted poison of an accusation fought in secret
had been insidiously undermining her sanity on the one central theme of
her life, and Boone's affirmative had seemed to sever with a shock of
complete surprise the anchor cable of her faith.

"No," she said, and for once it might have been the acid-marred voice of
her mother, "that's all I need to know."

"But, Anne"--Boone took an impulsive step toward her and sought to spe