She looked up in mild surprise at his tone and the rebellious glare in his eyes, and then said, slowly and wonderingly:
"Why do you think that?"
"I don't know, but I am sure of it," he blurted from the depths of his restrained passion. "Something tells me that this Mr. Frazier wants to furnish it, and also that you shrink from being in his debt."
Mary avoided his desperate gaze. "You are a great reader of minds," she faltered. "Many men would make me angry by saying what you are saying, but I can't be offended with you. It is strange, but nothing you could do or say would annoy me. Well, you are right. As I told you once, Mr. Frazier and I are not actually engaged. Somehow, I want to be free in that way a little longer. I'm so young, you know, that marriage does not appeal to me yet. Mr. Frazier has helped my father raise money in several instances, but I have never felt that those transactions bound me in any way; but I know, and he feels, that this particular offer of his—" Her voice sank and trailed away into inaudibility.
"That if you accepted this offer it would be binding?" Charles threw into the gap.
It seemed to him that she flushed slightly. She was very erect, very stately. Somehow he thought of her as a captured young queen suffering under the indignities of her enemies. She made no answer, and, leaning toward her, he repeated his words even more earnestly and in greater agitation.
"Yes, as I look at it, the acceptance would bind me," she finally gave out. "I could not take the money otherwise, for I simply have no way of paying. He put it that way himself; that he was as much interested in my brothers as I, because, in a sense, they would be his brothers."
Charles was pale; he was trembling; he knew that his voice was unsteady, for his whole being was surcharged with a passion which his reason could not justify, and which his sheer helplessness only intensified.
"You must not accept his money; you must not bind yourself," he cried.
"Why?" she asked, with the half-eager look even a desperate woman may wear when facing the evidence of a man's growing passion for her.