“Why, Elizabeth! Of course I care. And I have blamed myself straight through from the first.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t do that!” she protested quickly. “It is all my fault, or my—no, I simply won’t call it a misfortune.”
“Your fault?” he queried. “You mean because you didn’t suspect it and choke it off right at the beginning. But I haven’t give you a chance to do that, have I?”
“I didn’t suspect it,” she said musingly; “I was very far from suspecting it. It came all at once, like a blow, you know; and then it was too late to ‘choke it off,’ as you say.”
The man, the true man, in him rose up in its might to buffet him into the path of uprightness and straightforwardness. “No; it is not too late, Elizabeth,” he assured her gravely.
“Yes, it is,” she objected with pathetic earnestness.
“No,” he insisted. “We must still make good. Do you know what people at home will say if our engagement is broken now? They will say that I made it impossible for you to carry out Uncle Byrd’s wishes; and that I did it deliberately, to get the money for myself.”
“But you haven’t!” she cried in wide-eyed astonishment. “I am the guilty one.”
“You?”
“Yes. This is what I came all the way from Philadelphia to say to you, Vance. Do you remember, one time when we were trying to ‘galvanize,’ I think that was the word you used, ourselves into the sentimental ecstasy supposed to be the normal condition of engaged people, I told you jokingly that if I ever found any one whom I could really lo—like better——”