f be affected.... The unrest of the day--"

"No, no! _Please_," said she, almost ready to scream--"don't think this
is one of my new little ideas you speak of. I--it's true that we don't
seem to think alike about things.... But I'd never have noticed that at
all if I loved you. I'd want to think and do only as you wished. But
I don't--"

"I've spoiled you ... letting you think you could have your way with
me," said Hugo, in his thick and gritty voice. "You're mad to-night,
little girl ... aren't responsible for what you say...."

Flicked in her spirit, she broke across his argument with a changed
voice and gaze.

"Why is it madness not to love you?"

"It's not a thing to argue about now, I say. You do love me ... I know
it. You'll marry me next month, that I swear. Why--"

"No!--when I love, I want to look up, and when I marry, I'll marry above
me...."

That checked his queer truculence; and Cally, desperate with the need to
drive home her meaning, swept on with no more nervousness.

"And--don't you see?--I've not been able to look up to you since that
day last year.... The day--I'm sorry to have to say it--when you came
all the way down from New York to show me that you didn't care for a
woman who was getting new little ideas about telling the truth...."

Canning's face was the color of chalk, his look increasingly stony; in
his eyes strange passions mounted. Now he seemed, to intend to say
something, but the girl's words flowed with gathering intensity.

"Why, think what you did that day, Hugo!--_think, think!_ If I needed a
protector and a man,--and I did,--that was the time for you to show me
how protectors and men can act and love. If I was wrong, it seems to me
that was the time of all times when you ought to have stood by me,
protected me. But I was _right_--don't you know I was?... I--it was the
first time I had ever thought about doing right--and _you threw me over
for it_.... Of course I know there was a quarrel, but--you know
perfectly well what you said. You said then, just as you say now, that I
was shocked out of my senses, didn't know what I was saying. And then
you said that people would point at me to the longest day I lived, so
the thing to do was to hush it all up, or else I wasn't the girl you had
asked to be your wife. Anything--anything--except that I should tell the
truth.... So you went off and left me to bear it all alone. And then,
when my heart had been broken into little pieces, wh