to me for a minute," she said hoarsely.

"But I must speak, now,--dear, dearest."

"Am--am I that to you?" The feline in her caught desperately at the
opportunity.

"Always. From the first."

"But--you forgot."

"Let me atone with the rest of my life for that treason." He laughed
happily.

"You keep your promise, then, to the little girl?" At her feet lay the
galley proof. Birdlike she darted down upon it, seized, and tore it half
across. "No: you do it," she commanded, thrusting it into his hand.

No longer was he master of himself. The kiss had undermined him. "Must
I?" he said.

Victorious and aghast, she yet smiled into his face. "I knew I could
believe in you," she cried. "You're a true knight, after all. I declare
you my Knight-Editor. No well-equipped journalistic partnership should
be without one."

Perhaps had the phrase been different, Hal might have yielded. So
narrow a margin of chance divides the paths of honor and dishonor, to
mortals groping dimly through the human maze. But the words were an echo
to wake memory. Rugged, harsh, and fine the face of McGuire Ellis rose
before Hal. He heard the rough voice, with its undertone of affection
beneath the jocularity of the rather feeble pun, and it called him back
like a trumpet summons to the loyalty which he had promised to the men
of the "Clarion." He slipped the half-torn paper into his pocket.

"I can't do it, Esme."

"You--can't--do--it?"

"No." Finality was in the monosyllable.

She looked into his leveled and quiet eyes, and knew that she had lost.
And the demon of perversity, raging, stung her to its purposes.

"After this, you tell me that you can't, you won't?"

"Dearest! You're not going to let it make a difference in our love for
each other."

"_Our_ love! You go far, and fast."

"Do I go too far, since you have let me kiss you?"

"I didn't," she cried.

"Then you meant nothing by it?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "You are trying to take advantage of a
position which you forced," she said coldly.

"Let me understand this clearly." He had turned white. "You let me make
love to you, in order to entrap me and save your friend. Is that it?"

No reply came from her other than what he could read in compressed lips
and smouldering eyes.

"So that is the kind of woman you are." There were both wonder and
distress in his voice. "That is the kind of woman for whose promise to
be my wife I would have given the heart out of my body