He said it calmly and with the air of one who has weighed and measured the possibilities of success or failure. Then it was that Isabel first began dimly to understand that Harry Antrim, her schoolfellow and playmate, had somehow come to man’s estate what time she had been calling him a boy; and while she replied out of an honest heart, the newborn conviction helped her to choose the words. “It wouldn’t be right, Harry, even if you are willing to risk it and take the consequences, good or bad. I want you to believe me when I say that I don’t seem to know anything about the love that reaches out toward marriage; and I am afraid I don’t want to. I love my friends, and you more than any of the others; but I would turn my back on all of them if the doing of it would bring the answer to the question which is always and always at the tip end of my paint brushes. It’s unwomanly, hard-hearted--anything you like to call it--but it is the simple truth. You don’t want to marry a woman who feels that way, Harry, dear.” He ignored the argument, if, indeed, he had tried to follow it, and pressed her to give him his answer. “Which is it to be, Isabel--Yes, or No?” She parried the direct demand, not because there was any present uncertainty in her own mind, but because she discerned that in his eyes which warned her to deal gently with him. “I say you wouldn’t want to marry a woman without a heart--a loving, home-making heart, I mean; and that is what you would do if you took me. I have my own little battle to fight, and I must fight it alone, Harry. That is simple justice to you, or to any other good man who might ask me to marry him.” Antrim pounced upon the suggested alternative with unreasoning and vindictive acerbity. “Any other man, you say. Who is the other man, Isabel?” The steel of jealousy struck fire at once upon the flint of Isabel’s quick temper, and her mood changed in a twinkling. “You intimated, the other day, that it might be Mr. Brant,” she retorted with malice aforethought. Antrim set his teeth hard to keep back the bitter sayings that came uppermost, and when he could trust himself to speak again tried hard to make her deny his own assertion. “Just tell me there is no one else, Isabel, and I’ll be satisfied,” he pleaded; but Isabel, caring at that moment very little for Brant and a great deal for Antrim, yet stubbornly refused to give her lover even this small crumb of comfort. “Then--once more, Isabel--give me my answer. Is it to be Yes, or No?” “Oh, can’t you see? Can’t you understand that it must be No?” “There is no reservation--no little green twig of hope that you can hold out to me?” “Not as I hope to be sincere, Harry.” “Not if I should wait until you had won or lost the battle?”