"You haven't? And still you sit here on this log and eat cold chicken and tell me calmly that it's hopeless! I said awhile ago that you were very daring, but I'll retract in deference to that." "It's not exactly a lack of courage," Brockway objected, moved to defend himself when he would much rather have done something else. "There is another obstacle, and it is insurmountable. She is rich--rich in her own right, I'm told; and I am a poor man." "How poor?" "Pitifully so, from her point of view. So poor that if I gave her a five-room cottage and one servant, I could do no more." "Many a woman has been happy with less." "Doubtless, but they were not born in the purple." "Some of them were, if by that you mean born with money to throw away. I suppose you might say that of me." Brockway suddenly found the Denver eating-house cake very dry, but he could not take his eyes from her long enough to go and get a drink from the rill at the log-end. "But you would never, marry a poor man," he ventured to say. "Wouldn't I? That would depend very much upon circumstances," she rejoined, secure in the assurance that her secret was now double-locked in a dungeon of Brockway's own building. "If it were the right thing to do I shouldn't hesitate, though in that case I should go to him as destitute as the beggar maid did to King Cophetua." Brockway's heart gave a great bound and then seemed to forget its office. "How is that? I--I don't understand," he stammered. Gertrude gazed across at the shining mountain and took courage from its calm passivity. "I will tell you, because I promised to," she said. "I, too, have money in my own right, but it is only in trust, and it will be taken from me if I do not marry in accordance with the provisions of my granduncle's will. So you see, unless I accept my--the person named in the will, I shall be as dowerless as any proud poor man could ask." "But you will accept your cousin," said Brockway, quickly putting Fleetwell's name into the hesitant little pause. She looked steadfastly at the great peak and shook her head. "I shall not," she answered, and her voice was so low that Brockway saw rather than heard the denial. "Why?" he demanded. She turned to him with sudden reproach in her eyes. "You press me too hardly, but I suppose I have given you the right. The reason is because I--I don't think enough of him in the right way." "Tell me one other thing, if you can--if you will. Do you love someone else?" His voice was steadier now, and his eyes held her so that she could not turn back to the shining mountain, as she wanted to. None the less, she answered him truthfully, as she had promised. "I do." "Is he a poor man?" "He says he is." "How poor?" "As poor as you said you were a moment ago." "And you will give up all that you have had--all that you could keep--and go out into the world with him to take up life at its beginnings?" "If he asks me to. But he will not ask me; he is too proud."