"Since you know part, you may know all," he went on. "David Massingale owes your father—technically, at least—one hundred thousand dollars, which he can't pay; which your father isn't going to let him pay, if he can help it. And if Massingale doesn't pay he will lose his mine."
"You interested yourself? Would you mind telling me just why?" she asked.
"That is one of the things you couldn't understand."
She turned a calmly smiling face toward him.
"Oh, you are mistaken, greatly mistaken. I can understand it very well, indeed. You are in love with David Massingale's daughter."
Once more he neither denied nor affirmed, and she had turned to face the window again when she went on in the same unmoved tone:
"It was fine. I can appreciate such devotion even if I can't fully sympathize with it. Everybody should be in love like that—once. Every woman demands that kind of love—once. But afterward, you know—if one should be content to take the good the gods provide...." When she began again at the end of the eloquent little pause there was a new note in her voice, a note soothingly suggestive of swaying poppies in sunlit fields, of ease and peace and the ideal heights receding, of rose-strewn paths pleasant to the feet of the weary wayfarer. "Why shouldn't we take to-day, the only day we can be sure of having, and use and enjoy it while it is ours? Money?—there is money enough in the world, God knows; enough and to spare for anything that is worth the buying. I have money, if that is all—money of my own. And, if I should ask him, father would give me the 'Little Susan' outright, to do with it as I pleased."
Brouillard was leaning back in his chair studying her faultless profile as she talked, and the full meaning of what she was saying did not come to him at once. But when it did he sprang up and went to stand beside her. And all the honesty and manhood the evil days had spared went into what he said to her.
"I was a coward a moment ago, Miss Genevieve, when you spoke of the motive which had prompted me to help David Massingale. But you knew and you said the words for me. When you love as I do you will understand that there is an ecstasy in the very madness of it that is more precious than all the joys of a gold-mounted paradise without it. I must go on as I have begun."
"You will marry her?" she asked softly.