e to slip away. She came impulsively to his side, flinging
herself on the floor at his knees, carried away with the intensity of
her emotion.

[Illustration: "'What does all the rest amount to?' she said
breathlessly. 'I want you'"]

"What does all the rest amount to!" she said breathlessly. "I want you!
I want a man, not a dummy, in my life. I want some one to look up to,
bigger, stronger than I am, that can make me do things."

He put his hand on hers, thrilling as he bent quickly and kissed it.

"The trouble has been," he said slowly, "all this time I've been trying
to come to your ways of living, to reach you. Doris, I can't promise;
I'm not sure of myself, of what I think--"

"Oh, it would be such a dreadful thing if you were to let me go now,"
she said suddenly, covering her face. "Now, when I know what I could
do!"

"Yes," he assented, feeling too the power he had suddenly acquired to
make or mar a life, and with that power the responsibility.

"You can do anything with me," she said in a whisper.

He felt a lump in his throat, a sense of being blocked at every turn, a
horror of doing harm, and a wild pride in the thought that at the last
this girl, whom he had rebelled against so often for being without
emotion or passion, was at his feet, without reserve, a warm, adoring
woman.

"Doris, you have got to come to me on my footing," he said firmly at
last.

She accepted it as the answer she had longed for, raising her face
suffused with joy, pressing his hand to her heart, her eyes swimming
with tears, inarticulate.

"Try me--anything! I'm happy--so happy--so afraid-- I was so afraid--
Oh, Bojo, to think I might never have known you--lost you!"

When a little calm had been reestablished, she wished to marry him at
once, to live in one room in a boarding-house, if necessary, to prove
her sincerity. He answered her evasively, pretending to laugh at her,
feeling the while the leaden load of what by a trick of fate he had
assumed at the moment when he had expected the completest freedom. Yet
there was something so genuine, so uncalculated in her contrition,
something so helpless and appealing to his strength in her surrender to
his will and decision, that he felt stirred to a poignant pity, and
shrank before the brutality of inflicting pain.

When he left, quiet and brooding, turning the corner of the Avenue his
glance happened to go to a window on the second floor, and he saw Patsie
looking down. He s