h, I'm not jealous," he exclaimed, pacing up and down the length of
the room.

"Of course not," she agreed, seating herself in one of the
straight-backed chairs. Her clasped hands rested on the small round
table in the center of the room, while she looked out across the lawn to
the dahlias and zinnias on its farther edge.

Ashley, who had flung his panama on a sofa, continued to pace up and
down the room, his head bent and his fingers clasped tightly under his
jacket behind his back. He moved jerkily, like a man preserving outward
self-control in spite of extreme nervous tension.

He listened almost without interruption while she gave him a precise
account of Davenant's intervention in her father's troubles. She spared
no detail of her own opposition and eventual capitulation. She spoke
simply and easily, as though repeating something learned by heart, just
as she had narrated the story of Guion's defaulting in the morning.
Apart from the fact that she toyed with a paper-knife lying on the
table, she sat rigidly still, her eyes never wandering from the line of
autumn flowers on the far side of the lawn.

"So you see," she concluded, in her quiet voice, "I came to understand
that it was a choice between taking it from him and taking it from the
poor women papa had ruined; and I thought that as he was young--and
strong--and a man--he'd be better able to bear it. That was the reason."

He came to a standstill on the other side of the table, where he could
see her in profile.

"You're extraordinary, by Jove!" he muttered. "You're not a bit like
what you look. You look so fragile and tender; and yet you could have
let that old man--"

"I could only have done it if it was right. Nothing that's right is very
hard, you know."

"And what about the suffering?"

She half smiled, faintly shrugging her shoulders. "Don't you think we
make more of suffering than there's any need for? Suffering is nothing
much--except, I suppose, the suffering that comes from want. That's
tragic. But physical pain--and the things we call trials--are nothing so
terrible if you know the right way to bear them."

The abstract question didn't interest him. He resumed his restless
pacing.

"So," he began again, in his tone of conducting a court-martial--"so you
refused the money in the first place, because you thought the fellow was
trying to get you into his power. Have you had any reason to change your
opinion since?"

"None, except that h