And poor you!"

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Why, I mean--and I, too, can see June while I say it!--I mean that you
are making a terrible mistake. Oh, Robert Lorillard, don't pretend not
to understand. We're not two strangers fencing! I'm not just a bold
creature rushing in where angels fear to tread. I know!--I _have_ rushed
in, but I'm not bold. I'm frightened to death. Only--I had to come.
Every day I see that glorious girl breaking her heart. She hasn't said a
word, or looked a look, or wept a weep. She's a _soldier_. But she's
like a lost soul turned out of Paradise. The more I got to know of her
the more I felt you _couldn't_ have sent her away and found another
place for her because you were bored. So I came to see you. And you
needn't mind my knowing the real reason you sent her out of your house.
I won't tell her. If any one does that it must be you. And it _ought_ to
be you. You love each other. You belong to each other. You'd be divinely
happy together. You're wretched apart."

"_You_ say that?" Robert exclaimed, when by sheer force of lungs I'd
made him hear me through. "You--June's friend!"

"Yes. It's because I was her friend, and knew her so well, that I want
you to listen to your own heart; for if you don't, you'll break Joyce
Arnold's. June wouldn't want you to sacrifice your two lives on the
shrine of her memory. She loved happiness, herself. And she liked other
people to be happy."

Robert's eyes lit, whether with joy or anger I couldn't tell.

"You think June would be willing to have me marry another woman?" he
said.

"Yes, I do, if you loved the woman. And you do love her. It would be
useless to tell me you don't."

"I'm not going to tell you I don't. I've tried not to. I hoped she
didn't care."

"She does. Desperately, frightfully. I do believe it's killing her."

"God! And she saved my life. Elizabeth, I'd give mine for her, a dozen
times over, but----"

"What she needs is for you to give it _to_ her, not for her: give it
once and for all, to have and to hold while your heart's in your body."

I fired advice at him like bullets from a Maxim gun, and every bullet
reached its billet. I was so carried away by my wish for joy to rise
from tragedy that I hardly knew what I said, yet I felt that I had
caught Lorillard and carried him with me. The next thing I definitely
knew with my mere brain, I was sitting down with elbows on Robert's
desk, facing him as he leaned toward me. My whole