After a pause, "Of course," said Lady Claire in so gentle a little voice that it seemed to glide undisturbingly among his silent meditations, "of course, a man has his—pride."
"I hope so," said the young man briefly. He understood her to be probing for his reason for abandoning the chase; he understood that for her own sake she would like to see him successful with Arlee, and he was queerly sorry to be failing to help her there. But he had done all that he could....
The girl spoke again, her face straight ahead, her shadowy eyes staring out into the moonlight. "Is it—money?" she said in the same little breath of a voice.
"Money!" Billy threw back the words in surprise, half contemptuous, "Oh, Lord, no, it's not money! I haven't much of it now, but I'm going to make a bunch of the stuff—if I want to." He spoke with naïve and amazing confidence which somehow struck astounded belief into the listener. "There's enough of it there, waiting to be made—no, it's not money—though perhaps one might well think it ought to be. I suppose my work might strike a girl as hard for her," he went on, considering aloud these problems of existence, "for it's here to-day and there to-morrow—now doing a building in a roaring city and now damming up some reservoir deep in the mountains—but it always seemed to me that the girl who would like me would like that, too. It's seeing so much of life—and such real life! Oh, no," he said, and though a trace of doubt had struck into his voice, "that in itself wouldn't be what I'd call impossible—not for the right girl."
"But your work—would it always be in America?" said Lady Claire.
"Oh, always. It has to be, of course."
"Oh.... And—and—you—have to have—that work?"
"Why, of course, I have to have it!" Billy was bewildered, but entirely positive. "That's my work—the thing I'm made to do. I couldn't earn my salt selling apartment houses."
"Oh, no, no," the girl hurriedly agreed.
A long, long silence followed, a silence in which he was entirely oblivious to her imaginings. The moonlight lay heavy as dreams about them; her thoughts went darting to and fro like fluttering swallows.... She felt herself a stranger to herself.... She looked up at him with a sudden deer-like lift of her head, and then looked swiftly away.