k. I
have come to tell you that I am a coward--a shirk."

Miss Evelina laughed quietly in a way that stung him. "Yes?" she said,
politely. "I knew that. You need not have troubled to come and tell
me."

He winced. "Don't," he muttered. "If you knew how I have suffered!"

"I have suffered myself," she returned, coldly, wondering at her own
composure. She marvelled that she could speak at all.

"Twenty-five years ago," he continued in a parrot-like tone, "I asked
you to marry me, and you consented. I have never been released from my
promise--I did not even ask to be. I slunk away like a cur. The
honour of the spoken word still holds me. The tardy fulfilment of my
promise is the only atonement I can make."

The candle-light shone on his iron-grey hair, thinning at the temples;
touched into bold relief every line of his face.

"Twenty-five years ago," said Evelina, in a voice curiously low and
distinct, "you asked me to marry you, and I consented. You have never
been released from your promise--you did not even ask to be." The
silence was vibrant; literally tense with emotion. Out of it leaped,
with passionate pride: "I release you now!"

"No!" he cried. "I have come to fulfil my promise--to atone, if
atonement can be made!"

"Do you call your belated charity atonement? Twenty-five years ago, I
saved you from death--or worse. One of us had to be burned, and it was
I, instead of you. I chose it, not deliberately, but instinctively,
because I loved you. When you came to the hospital, after three
days----"

"I was ill," he interrupted. "The gas----"

"You were told," she went on, her voice dominating his, "that I had
been so badly burned that I would be disfigured for life. That was
enough for you. You never asked to see me, never tried in any way to
help me, never sent by a messenger a word of thanks for your cowardly
life, never even waited to be sure it was not a mistake. You simply
went away."

"There was no mistake," he muttered, helplessly. "I made sure."

He turned his eyes away from her miserably. Through his mind came
detached fragments of speech. _The honour of the spoken word still
holds him . . . Father always does the square thing_ . . .

"I am asking you," said Anthony Dexter, "to be my wife. I am offering
you the fulfilment of the promise I made so long ago. I am asking you
to marry me, to live with me, to be a mother to my son."

"Yes," repeated Evelina, "you ask me