Marjorie tried to focus harder than ever. She wanted to be unselfish, and tell him the thing that was right to do, at any cost—though she had not realized how much Pennington's help and society had been to her. She felt a terror at the idea of his going, the more because she felt ill. But that didn't count—that mustn't count. You have no right to let a man stay where he may fall in love with you, merely because you need him for a maiden aunt or something of the sort. And that was the ultimate and entire extent of her affection for him, strong though it had come to be.
"I think—I think that man had better go back to the place where he had really belonged at first," she said in a low voice. "No matter how much the girl missed him, or needed him, she had no right to want him to be hurt by staying near her."
"You really think that?" he said.
"Yes," she answered. And then incoherently, "Oh, Mr. Pennington, I do want to be good!"
She meant that she had done enough wrong, in acting as she had toward Francis in the first place. She felt now, very strongly, that all the trouble had come from her cowardice when Francis came home. She should have shut her teeth and gone through the thing, no matter what her personal feelings had been at first. It would all have come out right then. She knew now that she and Francis, the plunge once taken, could have stood each other. And she would have kept her faith. She had learned the meaning of honor.
"You are good," said Pennington in a moved tone. "Then—I have my answer. Yes—I'll go back."
She leaned her heavy head on the chair-back again. He seemed once more suddenly remote.
"I—I wish you weren't going," she said, only half conscious of what she said.
He leaned forward, suddenly moved, and caught her hand hard. Still in that dream, she felt him kiss it. She did not care. And then, still in the dream, Francis's quick tread up the steps, and his sharp voice—
"And I believed in you!"