"But I'm not out of sympathy," he interrupted earnestly. "I'm a Worker of the World, and always will be. I would prefer not to have to dress like this, but not because I deplore our aims. It is the misfortune of the class of men for whom I fight. Miss Torrance"—he slid abruptly down the trunk and leaned forward to look in her eyes—"I'm talking to you as I never talked before, as I scarcely dared to think. Any one else would hand me over to the Police. You won't. And to talk like this to a fellow-worker would mean a knife slid in here. No, you won't tell. I've known a lot of women, most of them bad ones because that's the only kind I have a chance to meet, but I never knew one to sell a man she did not hate . . . and a woman never hates till she first loves. You've never loved more than one."
"And not likely to," she put in quietly, even as she thrilled to the completeness of his trust.
He laughed harshly. "They all say that—that is, all but the kind any man can buy. But you know nothing of them—forgive me for mentioning them. . . . There aren't many women stick to their first love."
"Oh?" she said indifferently. "I haven't thought it worth discussing."
"No? Perhaps you're right. Many a time I've thought the same of woman, all women—until I learned that every woman, good or bad, is worth it."
His eyes had gone to the tree tops; they returned now so suddenly that she started. A curious smile moved his lips.
"Do you know, you've disturbed all my convictions of women? I really know so little of you that it may be foolish, but you've made me feel that woman in the singular may be so much more to a man than the whole mass of the sex. For you, or one of the very few like you, a man might give up every other ambition without regret . . . and I've had many—women and ambitions—in my day."
She was flushing, though she knew from the utter frankness of it that he was not making love, not even being impertinent. She had no fear of him, only of her inexperience in handling so strange a situation.
"You make a man feel there is everything in tossing aside all I've attained, merely to settle down as a respectable citizen." He was staring through the tree-tops again, hands clasped over one knee. "I could make a way for myself, a good way, without all this fever, with a woman like you to hold me straight. I know what I can do." A forlorn smile wrinkled his face not unpleasantly. "But there are two insuperable obstacles. The Workers wouldn't let me—and the woman wouldn't have me. . . . That's why I grow desperate sometimes, why I—"
She questioned with her eyes his continued silence. "I won't tell," she promised gently, "but perhaps you'd better say no more."