"You wanted me to ... to marry him, Don?"
"I wanted you to?" He barely succeeded in checking, unspoken, the burning words on his tongue; but this time his voice betrayed him, and, if he had not been resolutely keeping his face turned away from her, he might have seen, even in that dim light, an odd change come into the expression of her lovely face, and seen a wonderfully tender and somewhat mischievous smile touch her lips. All that he did know, however, was that she gave a low, happy laugh, which was like a knife-thrust to his soul.
"Don," she said at length, "I have told no one else of my great secret yet, for I wanted to tell you, first of all. I couldn't go to sleep without telling you, for you have been such a dear confidant and father confessor to me that it seems as though I must tell you everything. I ... I've just got to tell you what has happened. May I?"
The man barely smothered a groan. Must he hear this girl, in her simplicity, talk on and on about the man she loved, and had promised to marry? It struck him, too, as strange that she should be willing to lay bare anything so sacred in a woman's life, but then she was her natural self, and quite different from most girls, in her attitude toward him.
But Rose was speaking quietly, and as though to herself, "Philip has been so sweet and good to me while you were away. You remember that you, yourself, told me that you meant him to take your place as my unofficial protector, and that I should go to him with my perplexities. It would have been better for me if I had followed your advice closer, but now I can laugh at spilt milk."
Rose had already confessed to Donald about her "investment" and been by him cross-examined into an admission of her little charities, which, in their aggregate, had so nearly wiped out her bank account. She could laugh about them now, for she had won to her goal, and already begun to earn a livelihood, but she had carefully hidden in her heart the story of the bitter struggle in which she had engaged to make both ends meet during the last few months of her course, when her mysterious refusals to accept any invitations from Ethel, Miss Merriman or Philip for her free afternoons and evenings, had left them wondering what on earth she was doing. No one guessed that they were spent in earning the few sadly needed dollars which her pride forbade her to borrow from any of them.
"Now I can laugh at spilt milk," Smiles' words echoed in Donald's brain, and hurt. He knew that Philip was fairly well-to-do, and, of course, Rose would want for nothing when she married him. This was the thought which brought the poignant stab.
"It was not strange that I began ... that he became very dear to me, was it, Donald?"
The man shook his head dumbly. He could not answer her in words.
"Perhaps I should not say it; but some time ago I began to guess that ... that he loved me. Not that he said a word, Donald, that is, not until to-day,—and then he didn't say it," she laughed a little. "He wrote it and he ... he asked me to marry him. He said, besides, that he had spoken to you, first, and that you had given your brotherly consent. It was a very sweet letter, Don; the first real love letter that I ever received, think of that!"