"I am still, in everything but this. I appreciate your desire for my happiness, Marian, but you are taking a responsibility beyond what is wise. I am complimented by your daughter's willingness to listen to an offer of marriage from me, but if the test really came she could not meet it."
"She would, Philip,—she would."
"I cannot comprehend it," he continued; "she has seen me at my worst."
"She understands you, and appreciates the wonderful qualities you possess. She is too young to know the depth of love, but old enough to recognize what a man like you can become to her. If you would only speak with her you too would understand."
Hamlen moved uncomfortably in his chair, and was silent for what seemed an interminable period. When at last he turned he spoke with a conviction which shocked her.
"No, Marian," he said deliberately; "it can never be. Let us end this farce before it goes too far."
"Philip!" she cried, seeing her work of months crumbling before her, and reading in his determined face the miscarriage of what she believed to be predestined. "I can't permit you to destroy the years which remain to you."
She leaned over and took his hand in hers. Success had been so near that she could not see it slip away from her now without a supreme effort. Merry needed such a man as this and Hamlen needed her. Why should these false ideas, created by years of self-depreciation, stand in the way of what she knew was best?
"I can't let you destroy the years which remain to you," she repeated earnestly. "I can't see my child's happiness marred by your foolish insistence upon ideals which rest on conditions now long since passed away. Philip, if you loved me once, show it now by your confidence in my judgment, by your faith in my purpose. Tell me one reason why this should not be."
"If I loved you once?" he echoed her words with a force which startled her. "Tell you one reason why this should not be? The one answers the other, Marian; for that love, intensified by the denial of twenty years, is now a power I can't withstand."