"What is it?" he said softly. "What's the trouble now?"
Briefly she told him, the barriers of her habitual reserve swept aside before the essentially human need to share a burden that has grown too great to bear alone.
"Oh, hell," Fyfe grunted, when she had finished. "This isn't any place for you at all."
He slid his arm across her shoulders and tilted her face with his other hand so that her eyes met his. And she felt no desire to draw away or any of that old instinct to be on her guard against him. For all she knew—indeed, by all she had been told—Jack Fyfe was tarred with the same stick as her brother, but she had no thought of resisting him, no feeling of repulsion.
"Will you marry me, Stella?" he asked evenly. "I can free you from this sort of thing forever."
"How can I?" she returned. "I don't want to marry anybody. I don't love you. I'm not even sure I like you. I'm too miserable to think, even. I'm afraid to take a step like that. I should think you would be too."
He shook his head.
"I've thought a lot about it lately," he said. "It hasn't occurred to me to be afraid of how it may turn out. Why borrow trouble when there's plenty at hand? I don't care whether you love me or not, right now. You couldn't possibly be any worse off as my wife, could you?"
"No," she admitted. "I don't see how I could."
"Take a chance then," he urged. "I'll make a fair bargain with you. I'll make life as pleasant for you as I can. You'll live pretty much as you've been brought up to live, so far as money goes. The rest we'll have to work out for ourselves. I won't ask you to pretend anything you don't feel. You'll play fair, because that's the way you're made,—unless I've sized you up wrong. It'll simply be a case of our adjusting ourselves, just as mating couples have been doing since the year one. You've everything to gain and nothing to lose."