"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because he wants me."
Rita sprang to her feet and began pacing the floor.
"I will not have it so!" she said excitedly, "I will not have it so! If he is a man—a real man—he will not have it so, either. If he will, he does not love you; mark what I say, Valerie—he does not love you enough. No man can love a woman enough to accept that from her; it would be a paradox, I tell you!"
"He loves me enough," said Valerie, very pale. "He could not love me as I care for him; it is not in a man to do it, nor in any human being to love as I love him. You don't understand, Rita. I must be a part of him—not very much, because already there is so much to him—and I am so—so unimportant."
"You are more important than he is," said Rita fiercely—"with all your fineness and loyalty and divine sympathy and splendid humility—with your purity and your loveliness; and in spite of his very lofty intellect and his rather amazing genius, and his inherited social respectability—you are the more important to the happiness and welfare of this world—even to the humblest corner in it!"
"Rita! Rita! What wild, partisan nonsense you are talking!"
[Illustration: "His thoughts were mostly centred on Valerie.">[
"Oh, Valerie, Valerie, if you only knew! If you only knew!"