"The trouble has been," he said slowly, "all this time I've been trying to come to your ways of living, to reach you. Doris, I can't promise; I'm not sure of myself, of what I think—"
"Oh, it would be such a dreadful thing if you were to let me go now," she said suddenly, covering her face. "Now, when I know what I could do!"
"Yes," he assented, feeling too the power he had suddenly acquired to make or mar a life, and with that power the responsibility.
"You can do anything with me," she said in a whisper.
He felt a lump in his throat, a sense of being blocked at every turn, a horror of doing harm, and a wild pride in the thought that at the last this girl, whom he had rebelled against so often for being without emotion or passion, was at his feet, without reserve, a warm, adoring woman.
"Doris, you have got to come to me on my footing," he said firmly at last.
She accepted it as the answer she had longed for, raising her face suffused with joy, pressing his hand to her heart, her eyes swimming with tears, inarticulate.
"Try me—anything! I'm happy—so happy—so afraid— I was so afraid— Oh, Bojo, to think I might never have known you—lost you!"
When a little calm had been reestablished, she wished to marry him at once, to live in one room in a boarding-house, if necessary, to prove her sincerity. He answered her evasively, pretending to laugh at her, feeling the while the leaden load of what by a trick of fate he had assumed at the moment when he had expected the completest freedom. Yet there was something so genuine, so uncalculated in her contrition, something so helpless and appealing to his strength in her surrender to his will and decision, that he felt stirred to a poignant pity, and shrank before the brutality of inflicting pain.
When he left, quiet and brooding, turning the corner of the Avenue his glance happened to go to a window on the second floor, and he saw Patsie looking down. He stopped, stumbling in his progress, and then, recovering himself, lifted his hat solemnly. She did not move nor make an answering gesture. He saw her only immobile, looking down at him.