She hesitated. He shrugged his shoulders slightly.
"Go on!" he said.
"I shall think that you are a coward," she said quietly. "I shall think that you are afraid to use what I risked—well, a great deal—to win for you."
"It isn't a question of courage," he protested.
"It is," she answered. "You are afraid to do what in your heart you must know is the right thing, because for a year or two, perhaps even a decade of years, it will mean a great upheaval. The end must be good. I am sure of it."
"If Deane and I," he answered, "can also convince ourselves of this, I shall act. You need not be afraid of that."
"Deane and you!" she repeated, contemptuously. "Who am I, then, in your counsels? Just a puppet, I suppose? Anyhow, it was I who ran the risk, I who gave these men into your hands. If you play the poltroon, everything is over between us, Norris."
He raised his eyes and looked at her in half-unwilling admiration. She and their hostess had come out on to the roof, just as the two men had been in the act of descending. A telephone call a few moments later had summoned Deane away, and his wife, who found the air a little chilly, had accompanied him. Stella was standing with her head thrown back, her figure tall and splendid in her evening gown of white satin, thrown into vivid relief against the background of empty air. She was angry, and the pose suited her. The slight hardness of her expression was lost in the dim blue twilight which still waited for the moon. Vine, an unemotional man, felt with a curious strength the charm of this isolation on the housetop, this tranquillity, so much more suggestive of solitude than anything which could be realized within the walls of a room. He shivered a little when he saw how close she was to the low parapet, and he held out his hand. She took it at once, and her face softened.
"Dear Norris," she said, "forgive me if I am disagreeable, but think what I went through to get that paper. Think how I have hoped that it might mean everything to you, perhaps to us."
She faltered, and it was in his mind then to speak the words which she had waited so long to hear from him, and yet he hesitated. He was a man who loved his freedom, not perhaps in the ordinary sense of the word, but he had still an almost passionate objection to lessening in any degree his individual hold upon life, to giving any one else a permanent right to share its struggles and its ambitions. He owed it to her, he was very sure of that, and yet he hesitated. She bent towards him. Perhaps she too felt that the moment was one not likely to be let go.