He knelt to clear the smouldering fire in the grate, and then got up to walk back and forth in front of it. Isabel sat down and shaded her eyes from the light. Levity was on the tip of her tongue, but she felt that his mood was one in which ridicule would be as the spark to gunpowder. Therefore she met it fairly and tried to reason with him.
“Must we go all over the old ground again, Harry?” she began. “Can’t I say something new and fresh—something that will make it clear to you that the worst possible thing that could happen to either of us would be this that you have set your heart upon?”
“I don’t think you can,” he objected, pausing in front of the mantel to adjust a picture which was three hairs’ breadths out of plumb. “But you may try, if you care to.”
But having leave to try, Isabel found that new sayings on a well-worn subject do not always suggest themselves on the spur of the moment, and she was obliged to leave the promise unfulfilled.
“It would only be dressing the old things up in new clothes if I did,” she confessed, “and that wouldn’t bring us to any better understanding.”
“It isn’t a question of understanding, Isabel; it is your ambition against my love—against reason, I had pretty nearly said. I don’t believe you love anybody else; and I—well, I’d be glad enough to take the chances of winning later on what you say you can’t give me now. That is the whole thing in a sentence, and it is for you to say whether I shall go away from here to-night the happiest of men or the most miserable.”
He said it calmly and with the air of one who has weighed and measured the possibilities of success or failure. Then it was that Isabel first began dimly to understand that Harry Antrim, her schoolfellow and playmate, had somehow come to man’s estate what time she had been calling him a boy; and while she replied out of an honest heart, the newborn conviction helped her to choose the words.
“It wouldn’t be right, Harry, even if you are willing to risk it and take the consequences, good or bad. I want you to believe me when I say that I don’t seem to know anything about the love that reaches out toward marriage; and I am afraid I don’t want to. I love my friends, and you more than any of the others; but I would turn my back on all of them if the doing of it would bring the answer to the question which is always and always at the tip end of my paint brushes. It’s unwomanly, hard-hearted—anything you like to call it—but it is the simple truth. You don’t want to marry a woman who feels that way, Harry, dear.”
He ignored the argument, if, indeed, he had tried to follow it, and pressed her to give him his answer.
“Which is it to be, Isabel—Yes, or No?”