"You may put it that way if you please. But I shall go on revering you as my torch-bearer," he asserted.
"Tell me," she said quickly; "was it for my sake that you spared Vincent Farley when all you had to do was to turn your back and go away?"
He took time to consider, and his answer put love under the foot of truth.
"No, it wasn't. If you make me confess the bald fact, I was not thinking of you at all, just at that one moment."
"I know it," she rejoined. "And I am big enough to be glad. Neither was it for my sake that you instructed your lawyers to return good for evil by redeeming the Farleys' stock just before they left for Colorado, or that you made restitution to the families of the men at Gordonia for their losses during the strike."
But again he was shaking his head dubiously.
"I'm not so sure about that. It's in any man to play high when the good opinion of the one woman is the stake. I'm a poseur, like all the others."
She smiled down on him and the slate-blue eyes were reading him to the latest-indited heart-line.
"You are posing now," she asseverated. "Don't I know?—don't I always and always know?" And, after a reflective moment: "It is a great comfort to be able to love the poses, and a still greater to be permitted to discern the true man under them."
"I am glad to believe that you don't see quite to the bottom of that well, Ardea, girl," he said with sudden gravity. "I get only occasional glimpses, myself, and they make me seasick. I don't believe any man alive could endure it to look long into the inner abysses of himself."