ly, why had her father the very
next day urged her to marry him? The answer came in a ghastly flash.
She recoiled as though in the presence of defilement. If she married
Randall, his lips would be closed against her father. That is what her
father had meant. The vague, disquieting suspicions of years that he
might not have the same standards of uprightness as other men, attained
an awful certainty. She remembered the incident of the private letter
and the look in her father's eyes.... Finally she revolted. Her soul
grew sick. She took no heed of Randall's protest. She only saw that she
was to be the cloak to cover up something unclean between them. At a
moment like this no woman pretends to have a sense of justice. Randall
had equal share with her father in an unknown baseness. She hated him
as he stood there so strong and handsome. And she hated herself for
having loved him.

At last he said with a smile:

"Yes, That's just it."

"What?"

She had forgotten the purport of her last remark.

"He was a bit too--well, not too pro-German--but too anti-English for
me. You have got hold of the wrong end of the stick all the time,
Phyllis dear. I'm no more pro-German than you are. Perhaps I see things
more clearly than you do. I've been trained to an intellectual view of
human phenomena."

Her little pink and white face hardened until it looked almost ugly.
The unpercipient young man continued:

"And so I take my stand on a position that you must accept on trust. I
am English to the backbone. You can't possibly dream that I'm not.
Come, dear, let me try to explain."

His arm curved as if to encircle her waist. She sprang away.

"Don't touch me. I couldn't bear it. There's something about you I
can't understand."

In her attitude, too, he found a touch of the incomprehensible. He
said, however, with a sneer:

"If I were swaggering about in a cheap uniform, you'd find me
simplicity itself."

She caught at his opening, desperately.

"Yes. At any rate I'd find a man. A man who wasn't afraid to fight for
his country."

"Afraid!"

"Yes," she cried, and her blue eyes blazed. "Afraid. That's why I can't
marry you. I'd rather die than marry you. I've never told you. I
thought you'd guess. I'm an English girl and I can't marry a coward--a
coward--a coward--a coward."

Her voice ended on a foolish high note, for Randall, very white, had
seized her by the wrist.

"You little fool," he cried. "You'll live to repent