girl an' have good time, then
'pouf!--zat is all!"

She turned upon him hotly, her face a mixture of humiliation and angry
resentment.

"You can't criticise him to me, Mr. Dubois! I won't listen. If I have
been fool enough to misunderstand his kindness that's my fault, not
his."

Dubois's eyes became suddenly inscrutable. After a moment's silence he
said quietly--

"You love heem, I think. Zat iss too bad for you. What you do now, Mees
Teesdale? Where you go?"

He saw that her clasped hands tightened at the question, though she
replied calmly--

"I don't know, not yet."

"Perhaps you marry me, mam'selle? I ask you once--I haf not change my
mind."

She stared at him with a kind of terror in her eyes.

Was _this_ her way out! Was this the place that somewhere in the world
she had declared defiantly was meant for her? Was it the purpose of the
Fates to crowd her down and out--until she was glad to fill it--a
punishment for her ambitions--for daring to believe she was intended for
some other life than this?

Upon that previous occasion when the old Frenchman had made her the
offer of marriage which had seemed so grotesque and impossible at the
time, he had asserted in his pique, "You might be glad to marry old
Edouard Dubois some day," and she had turned her back upon him in light
contempt--now she was, not glad, she could never be that, but grateful.

"But I--don't love you." Her voice sounded strained and hoarse.

"Zat question I did not ask you--I ask you will you marry me?" He did
not wait for an answer, but went on persuasively, yet stating the bald
and hopeless facts that seemed so crushing to her youth and
inexperience. "You have no parent--no home, Mees Teesdale; you have no
money and not so many friend in Crowheart. You marry me and all is
change. You have good home and many friends, because," he chuckled
shrewdly, "when I die you have thirty thousand sheep. Plenty sheep,
plenty friends, my girl. How you like be the richest woman in this big
county, mam'selle?"

The girl was listening, that was something; and she was thinking hard.

Money! how they all harped upon it!--when she had thought the most
important thing in the world was love. Even Ogden Van Lennop she
remembered had called it the great essential and now she saw that old
Edouard Dubois who had lived for seventy years regarded it in a wholly
reverent light.

"When you marry me you have no more worry, no more trouble, no more
tears."