The only thing his own manner met was the obstinacy. "I'll get it from _him_!"
She repeated her headshake, but with a world of sadness added, "Get it if you can!"
He looked into her eyes now as if it was the sadness that struck him most. "He won't say, because he _did_ you?"
They showed each other, on this, the least separated faces yet. "He'll never, never say."
The confidence in it was so tender that it sounded almost like pity, and the young man took it up with all the flush of the sense that pity could be but for _him_. This sense broke full in her face. "The scoundrel!"
"Not a bit!" she returned, with equal passion--"I was only too clever for him!" The thought of it was again an exaltation in which she pushed her friend aside. "So let me go!"
The push was like a jar that made the vessel overflow, and he was before her now as if he stretched across the hall. "With the heroic view of your power and the barren beauty of your sacrifice? You pour out money, you move a mountain, and to let you 'go,' to close the door fast behind you, is all I can figure out to do for you?" His emotion trembled out of him with the stammer of a new language, but it was as if in a minute or two he had thrown over all consciousness. "You're the most generous--you're the noblest of women! The wonderful chance that brought you here----!"
His own arm was grasped now--she knew better than he about the wonderful chance. "It brought _you_ at the same happy hour! I've done what I liked," she went on very simply; "and the only way to thank me is to believe it."
"You've done it for a proud, poor man"--his answer was quite as direct. "He has nothing--in the light of such a magic as yours--either to give or to hope; but you've made him, in a little miraculous hour, think of you----"
He stumbled with the rush of things, and if silence can, in its way, be active, there was a collapse too, for an instant, on her closed lips. These lips, however, she at last opened. "How have I made him think of me?"
"As he has thought of no other woman!" He had personal possession of her now, and it broke, as he pressed her, as he pleaded, the helpless fall of his eloquence. "Mrs. Gracedew--don't leave me." He jerked his head passionately at the whole place and the yellow afternoon. "If you made me care----"