d-by simply won't be in it--not for me." He looked at her across
the packing-case between them, and dropped his voice to add: "But you
wouldn't, of course."

"I would, dear Jim!" she cried, with warm impulsiveness; "that is, I
might. A good man like you is worth a worldful of money and furniture.
I don't live for those things, as you seem to think; but--but you know
how it is--I can't change about from one to another--"

He dropped the saddest "No" into the pregnant pause.

"No, Deb--no; I expected that. Staunch through everything--that's you
all over. Well"--with a movement as if to pull himself together--"I'm
staunch too. We're equals in that, anyhow, and don't you forget it.
I'll not bother you any more--I never have bothered you, have I?--but
I'm here when you want me, body and soul, at any hour of the day or
night. You'll remember that?" stretching his horny hand across to her,
and being in the same instant electrified by the touch of her lips upon
it.

"Oh, I will! I will!"

The evening post brought a ship letter. Guthrie Carey was in port. He
had been there long enough to hear the news that Deborah Pennycuick was
penniless, and that Claud Dalzell had deserted her. So he had written
to her at length--the longest letter of his life--ten pages.

She took it to her bedroom and sat down to read it, while at the same
time she rested a little before dinner. She had frowned over the
envelope; now she smiled over the first pages; she sighed over the
middle ones; she even wept a little over the last. Then she wrote out
an answer and sent it by a groom to the nearest telegraph office:

"Please do not come. Am writing."

Thus she cast aside in one day three good men and true, heart-bound to
one who was not worthy to be ranked with any of them. But that is the
way of love.

CHAPTER XIV.

There was an attic at the top of a dark flight of stairs in the
suburban villa that was now the sisters' home. It contained a fireplace
and a long dormer window--three square casements in a row, of which the
outer pair opened like doors--facing the morning sun and a country
landscape. The previous tenants had used it for a box and lumber room,
and left it cobwebbed, filthy and asphyxiating. Deb ordered a charwoman
to clean it, and a man to distemper the grubby plaster and stain the
floor, and then laid down rugs, and assembled tables and books, and
basket-chairs, and girls' odds and ends; whereby it was transformed
into a