"This home of yours, where a nice kid like Howard is forbidden to speak of you, and where older men look scared when your name is mentioned and say they never heard of you?"
"You said all that before." Agatha had turned rather white. "And it won't do any good to say it again."
Warren studied her averted face, a pensive face at that moment. He had a confused certainty that he had been too hard on her. He had only spoken the truth and for her good, but he had overdone it. He had been brutal.
"Hephzibah," he said suddenly, a new gentleness in his voice, "I know what's the matter with you. You're in love."
There was something so virginal in her protesting recoil that he had to stop a moment for breath. Yet a quality in the movement gave him an odd conviction of her innate fineness, in spite of that chapter in her past he found it hard to forget.
"There's no other explanation, Hephzibah." He tried to speak lightly without any great degree of success. "When a girl of your sort sticks to a place of this sort, like a barnacle to a ship's bottom, it's as sure as shooting that there's a man in the case. Come, Hephzibah, own up."
She lifted her chin in a regal way she had—an incongruous motion in a country girl who "worked out"—and looked at him squarely. With a little thrill he saw that her eyes had filled again. And though she did not speak, those brimming eyes seemed a brave, frank avowal that his surmise had hit the mark.
"Well, Hephzibah, I'm glad you aren't going to need our help—Forbes' and mine—in order to be happy. I hope your young man knows he's lucky." He was astonished at the keenness of the pang which marked this formal renunciation. "When is it to be, Hephzibah?"
"Why, it's not—you don't understand—I'm not going to be married."
Warren sat up straight. "The devil, you're not," he said, his voice harshly cynical.