They talked till half the long summer night was gone. She sat near him, and sometimes Julian let his hand touch her shoulder or her hair while he unpacked his heart to her. The bitterness of his reserve was gone.
"I think perhaps I could have stood it decently if it hadn't been for Marian," he explained. "I was damned weak about her, and that's a fact. You see, I thought she had the kind of feeling for me that women sometimes have and which some men deserve; but I'm bound to admit I wasn't one of them. When I saw that Marian took things rather the way I should have taken them myself, I went down under it. I said, 'That's the end of love.' It was the end of the kind I was fit for, the kind that has an end.
"Now I'm going to tell you something. I never shall again, so you must make the most of it, and keep it to hold on to when I behave badly. You've put the fear of God into me, Stella. Nothing else would have made me give in to you; and you know I have given in to you, don't you?"
"You've given me everything in the world I want," said Stella, gently, "if that's what you call giving in to me."
"I've done more than that," said Julian, quietly. "I've let you take my will and turn it with that steady little hand of yours; and it's the first time—and I don't say it won't be the last—that I've let any man or woman change my will for me.
"Now I'm going to send you to bed. I oughtn't to have you kept you up like this; but if I've got to let you go back to your people to-morrow, we had to know each other a little better first, hadn't we? I've been trying not to know you all these months.
"Before you go, would you mind telling me about Mr. Travers and the cat?"
"No," said Stella, with a startled look; "anything else in the world, Julian, but not Mr. Travers and the cat."
"Ostrog and I are frightfully jealous by nature," Julian pleaded. "He wouldn't be at all nice to that cat if he met it without knowing its history."
"He can't be unkind to the poor cat," said Stella; "it's dead."