"This is our last spin together on the high plains, I suppose," he said.
"Your mother has fixed upon to-morrow for our return to town, hasn't she?"

Elinor confirmed it half-absently. She had been keyed up to face the
inevitable in this drive with Ormsby, and she was afraid now that he was
going to break her resolution by a dip into the commonplaces.

"Are you glad or sorry?" he asked.

Her reply was evasive.

"I have enjoyed the thin, clean air and the freedom of the wide horizons.
Who could help it?"

"But you have not been entirely happy?"

It was on her lips to say some conventional thing about the constant
jarring note in all human happiness, but she changed it to a simple "No."

"May I try if I can give the reason?"

She made a reluctant little gesture of assent; some such signal of
acquiescence as Marie Antoinette may have given the waiting headsman.

"You have been afraid every day lest I should begin a second time to press
you for an answer, haven't you?"

She could not thrust and parry with him. They were past all that.

"Yes," she admitted briefly.

"You break my heart, Elinor," he said, after a long pause. "But"--with a
sudden tightening of the lips--"I'm not going to break yours."

She understood him, and her eyes filled quickly with the swift shock of
gratitude.

"If you had made a study of womankind through ten lifetimes instead of a
part of one, you could not know when and how to strike truer and deeper,"
she said; and then, softly: "Why can't you make me love you, Brookes?"

He took his foot from the brake-pedal, and for ten seconds the released
car shot down the slope unhindered. Then he checked the speed and answered
her.

"A little while ago I should have said I didn't know; but now I do know.
It is because you love David Kent: you loved him before I had my chance."

She did not deny the principal fact, but she gave him his opportunity to
set it aside if he could--and would.

"Call it foolish, romantic sentiment, if you like. Is there no way to
shame me out of it?"

He shook his head slowly.

"You don't mean that."

"But if I say that I do; if I insist that I am willing to be shamed out of
it."

His smile was that of a brother who remembers tardily to be loving-kind.

"I shall leave that task for some one who cares less for you and for your
true happiness than I do, or ever shall. And it will be a mighty thankless
service that that 'some one' will render you."

"But I