"Ask it, all the same."
"I can't."
"Then I'll offer it.... I give up—Stephanie—to you."
The silence lasted a long time. Neither man stirred. Finally Cleland said in an altered voice:
"I can't ask it—unless she does, too. I don't know what to say to you, Grismer, except that no man ever spoke more nobly——"
"That is enough. If you really think it, that means everything, Cleland.... And this is my chance to tell you that when I—married her—I never dreamed that it could ever be a question of you.... I don't believe she did, either.... But it has become so. That is the question, now.... And so I—step out."
"I—I tell you I can't accept—that way—unless she asks it, too," stammered Cleland.... "After all, it's got to be on a basis of her happiness.... I am not sure that her happiness lies in my keeping. I do not know how much she cares for you—how deeply you are engaged in her heart.... I can't find out.... I'm like a blind man involved in a maze!"
"She cares for me," said Grismer in his low, pleasant voice. "We have been intimate in mind—close and responsive, intellectually.... Sentimentally, too. On her part a passionless loyalty to whatever in me she believed appealed to her intelligence and imagination; an emotional solicitude for what she discovered in me that aroused her sympathy——"
He turned and looked at Cleland in the darkness:
"Hers is a tender heart, Cleland. Impulse carries it to extremes. Injustice to another provokes quick action from her; and nothing so sways her as her intense sense of gratitude, unless it be her fear of wounding others.