east bit sorry for you!" Willa cried. "I am
exasperated with you! Do you suppose I am the sort of woman to care
what a man has, rather than what he is? Am I a painted pampered doll
that I must be approached with gifts and sweets and dangled before the
highest bidder? My mother married the man she loved and starved with
him and died working to take care of his child! Am I less a woman than
she?"

"Willa!" He breathed her name in a fervent whisper and caught her two
hands in his. "Willa, look at me!"

She raised her blazing eyes and the flame died to a soft luminous glow,
while the rich color mantled to her brow.

"Willa, do you mean that you care, really?--Oh, I vowed I would not ask
you until I had proved myself worthy, and now, when everything is at a
standstill, an impasse, and you yourself have warned me of the
impossibility of winning out in my plan for the future, I--I forget all
my resolutions! It is unfair for me to speak now, it is not playing
the game, but will you tell me at least that you won't be displeased
with me if sometime I come to you, when I have won the right? I will
ask no promise now, I cannot, but if I could know that you cared ever
so little--"

"How can you know if--if you don't ask?" Willa's downright honesty had
gotten the better of her timidity and with characteristic fearlessness
she disclosed all that was in her own wildly throbbing heart. "I don't
know how a man could prove himself more worthy of any woman than by
taking his life in his hands on a hundred-to-one chance of saving hers!
I don't know what difference the loss or finding of the Pool makes in
the happiness of you and me. Go ahead and make a martyr of yourself
over your silly pride if you want to! If I thought you didn't care,
that you were just trying to carry on the ghastly game they call
flirtation up here, I wouldn't be so angry with you. I'm not Willa
Murdaugh down inside of me, and you know it!--I'm just Gentleman
Geoff's Billie, a waif raised by the greatest-hearted man that ever
lived, but I've got some pride myself. I don't want any man who hasn't
s-spunk enough to ask me!"

"Willa! Oh, my dearest, will you--!"

"Here comes Winnie Mason!" She drew her hands from his and sprang up
with a nervous tinkle of laughter. "That means we've missed three
dances, and you were to have had two of them with Angie! You'll be in
for a dreadful panning--"

"You wicked little--adorable little--girl o' mine!" he