"A generous impulse. They would repent of it by and by. I am not one of them, and they know it, now, as I did at the beginning. No doubt they would be courteous, but you see a half-contemptuous toleration would gall me."
There was a little smile on Maud Barrington's lips, but it was not in keeping with the tinge in her cheek and the flash in her eyes.
"I once told you that you were poor at subterfuge, and you know you are wronging them," she said. "You also know that even if they were hostile to you, you could stay and compel them to acknowledge you. I fancy you once admitted as much to me. What has become of the pride of the democracy you showed me?"
Winston made a deprecatory gesture. "You must have laughed at me. I had not been long at Silverdale then," he said dryly. "I should feel very lonely now. One man against long generations. Wouldn't it be a trifle unequal?"
Maud Barrington smiled again. "I did not laugh, and this is not England, though what you consider prejudices do not count for so much as they used to there, while there is, one is told quite frequently, no limit to what a man may attain to here, if he dares sufficiently."
A little quiver ran through Winston, and he rose and stood looking down on her, with one brown hand clenched on the table and the veins showing on his forehead.
"You would have me stay?" he said.
Maud Barrington met his eyes, for the spirit that was in her was the equal of his. "I would have you be yourself--what you were when you came here in defiance of Colonel Barrington, and again when you sowed the last acre of Courthorne's land, while my friends, who are yours too, looked on wondering. Then you would stay--if it pleased you. Where has your splendid audacity gone?"
Winston slowly straightened himself, and the girl noticed the damp the struggle had brought there on his forehead, for he understood that if he would stretch out his hand and take it what he longed for might be his.
"I do not know, any more than I know where it came from, for until I met Courthorne I had never made a big venture in my life," he said. "It seems it has served its turn and left me--for now there are things I am afraid to do."