"You don't know him," said Sharlee.
A proud and beautiful look swept over her face. West rose, looking wretchedly unhappy, and stood, irresolute, facing her.
"Can't you—forgive me?" he asked presently, in a painful voice.
Sharlee hesitated.
"Don't you know I said that it would only make things worse to talk about it to-night?" she said gently. "Everything you say seems to put us further and further apart. Why, there is nothing for me to forgive, Mr. West. There was a situation, and it imposed a certain conduct on you; that is the whole story. I don't come into it at all. It is all a matter between you and—your own-"
"You do forgive me then? But no—you talk to me just as though you had learned all this from somebody else—as though I had not come to you voluntarily and told you everything."
Sharlee did not like to look at his face, which she had always seen before so confident and gay.
"No," said she sadly—"for I am still your friend."
"Friend!"
He echoed the word wildly, contemptuously. He was just on the point of launching into a passionate speech, painting the bitterness of friendship to one who must have true love or nothing, and flinging his hand and his heart impetuously at her feet. But looking at her still face, he checked himself, and just in time. Shaken by passion as he was, he was yet enough himself to understand that she would not listen to him. Why should he play the spendthrift and the wanton with his love? Why give her, for nothing, the sterile satisfaction of rejecting him, for her to prize, as he knew girls did, as merely one more notch upon her gun?