"On the contrary, you owe me nothing at all."
"We'll not dispute the point now."
"No; but I'd rather not leave you under a misapprehension. If I've done anything to-night—been of any use at all—it's been simply because I loved Dorothea—and—and—it was right. When it was in my power, I couldn't have refused to do it for any one—for any one, you understand."
"Oh yes, I understand perfectly; but any one, in the same circumstances, would feel as I do. No, not as I do," he corrected, quickly. "No one else in the world could feel—" "I'm really very tired," she said, hurriedly; "I'll go now; but I count on you to call me."
He watched her while she glided across the room; but it was only when her door had closed and he had dropped into his seat that he was able to state to himself the fact that the mere sight of her again had demolished all the barricades he had been building in his heart against her for the last six months. They had fallen more easily than the walls of Jericho at the blast of the sacred horn. The inflection of her voice, the look from her eyes, the gestures of her hands, had dispelled them into nothingness, like ramparts of mist. But it was not that alone! He was too much a man of affairs not to give credit to the practical abilities she had shown that night. No graces of person or charms of mind or resources of courage could have called forth his admiration more effectively than this display of prosaic executive capacity. What had to be done she had done more promptly, wisely, and easily than any man could have accomplished it. She had foreseen possibilities and forestalled accident with a thoroughness which he himself could not have equalled.
"My God!" he groaned, inwardly, "what a wife she would have made for any man! How I could have loved her, if it hadn't been for—"
He stopped abruptly and leaped to his feet, looking around dazed on the great empty hail, at the end of which a porter slept in his chair, while the clerk blinked drowsily behind his desk.
"I do love her," he declared to himself. "All summer long I have uttered blasphemies. I do love her. Whatever she may have been, she shall be my wife."
Out on the terrace the cold wind was grateful, and he stood for a minute bareheaded, letting it blow over his fevered face and through his hair. It had risen during the last hour, making the pines rock slowly in the starlight and swelling their moan into deep sobs.
As Derek Pruyn paced the terrace in strained expectation he was deceived again and again into the thought that something was approaching. Now it was the champing and stamping of horses toiling up the ascent; now it was the bray and throb of the automobile; now it was the voices of men, conversing or calling or breaking into laughter. Twenty times he hastened to the steps at the end of the terrace, sure he could not have been mistaken, only to hear the earth-forces sob and sough and shout again, as if in derision of this puny, presumptuous mortal, with his evanescent joy and pain.