o' me thinkin'? I've got nothin' to do with it."

"You might have."

"I can't imagine what, unless it'd be----" Realizing what she had been
about to say, she broke off in confusion, coloring to the eyes.

He nodded. "I see you understand. I want you to come off somewhere and
marry me."

She took it more calmly than if she hadn't thought him mad. "But--but
you said you'd be--be goin' to the devil."

"Well?"

His look, his tone, conveyed the idea, which penetrated to her mind
but slowly. When it did, the surging color became a flush, hot and
painful.

So here it was again, the thing she had been running away from. It had
outwitted and outrun her, meeting her again just at the instant when
she thought she was shaking it off. She was so indignant with the
_thing_ that she almost overlooked the man. She too swung round from
her end of the bench, so that they confronted each other, with the
length of the seat between them. It was her habit to put things
plainly, though now she did it with a burning heart.

"This is the way you mean it, isn't it?--you'd go to the devil because
you'd married _me_."

The half-minute before he answered was occupied not merely in thinking
what to say but in noticing, now that he had her in full-face, that
her large, brown irises seemed to be sprinkled with gold dust.
Otherwise her appearance struck him simply as blurred, as if it had
been brightly enough drawn as to color and line, only rubbed over and
defaced by the hand of misery.

"I don't want you to get me wrong," he explained. "It's not a question
of my marrying you in particular. I've said I'd marry the first girl I
met who'd marry me."

The gold-brown eyes scintillated with a thousand tiny stars. "Say, and
am I the first?"

"No; you're the fourth." He added, so that she should be under no
misconception as to what he was about: "You can take me or leave me.
That's up to you. But if you take me, I want you to understand that
it'll be on a purely business basis."

She repeated, as if to memorize the words, "A purely business basis."

"Exactly. I'm not looking for a wife. I only want a woman to marry--a
woman to whom I can point and say, See there! I've married--that."

"And _that'd_ be me."

"If you undertook the job."

"The job of--of bein' laughed at--jeered at----"

"I'd be the one who'd be laughed at and jeered at. Nobody would think
anything about you. They wouldn't remember how you looked or know your
name. If y