."

"How can I be your wife?" she said, her breast heaving. "You know all
that has happened. It would be monstrous."

"Not at all," was his quiet reply. "It would be natural and right.
Julie, it is strange that I should be talking to you like this. You're
so much cleverer than I--in some ways, so much stronger. And yet, in
others--you'll let me say it, won't you?--I could help you. I could
protect you. It's all I care for in the world."

"How can I be your wife?" she repeated, passionately, wringing her
hands.

"Be what you will--at home. My friend, comrade, housemate. I ask nothing
more--_nothing_." His voice dropped, and there was a pause. Then he
resumed. "But, in the eyes of the world, make me your servant and
your husband!"

"I can't condemn you to such a fate," she cried. "You know where my
heart is."

Delafield did not waver.

"I know where your heart was," he said, with firmness. "You will banish
that man from your thoughts in time. He has no right to be there. I take
all the risks--all."

"Well, at least for you, I am no hypocrite," she said, with a quivering
lip. "You know what I am."

"Yes, I know, and I am at your feet."

The tears dropped from Julie's eyes. She turned away and hid her face
against one of the piers of the wall.

Delafield attempted no caress. He quietly set himself to draw the life
that he had to offer her, the comradeship that he proposed to her. Not a
word of what the world called his "prospects" entered in. She knew very
well that he could not bring himself to speak of them. Rather, a sort of
ascetic and mystical note made itself heard in all he said of the
future, a note that before now had fascinated and controlled a woman
whose ambition was always strangely tempered with high, poetical
imagination.

Yet, ambitious she was, and her mind inevitably supplied what his voice
left unsaid.

"He will have to fill his place whether he wishes it or no," she said to
herself. "And if, in truth, he desires my help--"

Then she shrank from her own wavering. Look where she would into her
life, it seemed to her that all was monstrous and out of joint.

"You don't realize what you ask," she said, at last, in despair. "I am
not what you call a good woman--you know it too well. I don't measure
things by your standards. I am capable of such a journey as you found me
on. I can't find in my own mind that I repent it at all. I can tell a
lie--you can't. I can have the meanest and most so