his eyes--those fine eyes of his which
were watching her so intently--tried to meet them steadily with her own
lovely, tear-stained ones--and failed. Swiftly an intense colour dyed her
cheeks, and she dropped her head like a guilty child.

"Of course I care--that is, in a way," she was somehow forced to admit
before the bar of his silence. "Why shouldn't I hate to lose the friend
who used to carry my books to school, and fought the other boys for my
sake, and has been a brother to me all these years? Of course I do. And
when I am tired I cry for nothing--just nothing. I----"

It was certainly a brave attempt at eloquence, but perhaps it was not
wonderfully convincing. At all events it did not keep Anthony from taking
possession of one of her hands and interrupting her with a most irrelevant
speech.

"Juliet, do you remember telling me that you should expect a man who loved
you to carry your likeness always with him? And you asked me for
_hers_--and I had to own I had left it behind. Yet I had one with me
then--it is always with me--and that was why I forgot the other. Look."

He drew out a little silver case, and Juliet, reluctantly releasing one
eye from the shelter of the friendly sofa pillow, saw with a start her own
face look smiling back at her. It was a little picture of her girlish self
which she had given him long ago when he went away to college.

"No," he said quickly, as he recognised the indignant question which
instantly showed in her eyes, "I'm not disloyal to Eleanor Langham.
Because--dear--there is no such person."

With a little cry she flung herself away from him among the pillows,
hiding her face from sight. There was a moment's silence while Anthony
Robeson, his own face growing pale with the immensity of the stakes for
which he played, made his last venture.

"The little home is only for you, Juliet. If you won't share it with me it
shall be closed and sold. Perhaps it was an audacious thing to do--it has
come over me a great many times that it was too audacious ever to be
forgiven. But I couldn't help the hope that if you should make the home
yourself you might come to feel that life with a man who had his way to
make could be borne after all--if you loved him enough. It all depended on
that. As I said, I didn't mean to be presumptuous, but it was a desperate
chance with me, dear. I couldn't give you up, and I thought perhaps--just
_perhaps_--you cared--more than you knew. Anyhow--I loved you