Anthony Dexter brushed past her and strode into the parlour. Through her veil, she would scarcely have recognised him--he was so changed. Upon the instant, there was a transformation in herself. The suffering, broken-hearted woman was strangely pushed aside--she could come again, but she must step aside now. In her place arose a veiled vengeance, emotionless, keen, watchful; furtively searching for the place to strike. "Evelina," began the man, without preliminary, "I have come back. I have come to tell you that I am a coward--a shirk." Miss Evelina laughed quietly in a way that stung him. "Yes?" she said, politely. "I knew that. You need not have troubled to come and tell me." He winced. "Don't," he muttered. "If you knew how I have suffered!" "I have suffered myself," she returned, coldly, wondering at her own composure. She marvelled that she could speak at all. "Twenty-five years ago," he continued in a parrot-like tone, "I asked you to marry me, and you consented. I have never been released from my promise--I did not even ask to be. I slunk away like a cur. The honour of the spoken word still holds me. The tardy fulfilment of my promise is the only atonement I can make." The candle-light shone on his iron-grey hair, thinning at the temples; touched into bold relief every line of his face. "Twenty-five years ago," said Evelina, in a voice curiously low and distinct, "you asked me to marry you, and I consented. You have never been released from your promise--you did not even ask to be." The silence was vibrant; literally tense with emotion. Out of it leaped, with passionate pride: "I release you now!" "No!" he cried. "I have come to fulfil my promise--to atone, if atonement can be made!" "Do you call your belated charity atonement? Twenty-five years ago, I saved you from death--or worse. One of us had to be burned, and it was I, instead of you. I chose it, not deliberately, but instinctively, because I loved you. When you came to the hospital, after three days----" "I was ill," he interrupted. "The gas----" "You were told," she went on, her voice dominating his, "that I had been so badly burned that I would be disfigured for life. That was enough for you. You never asked to see me, never tried in any way to help me, never sent by a messenger a word of thanks for your cowardly life, never even waited to be sure it was not a mistake. You simply went away." "There was no mistake," he muttered, helplessly. "I made sure." He turned his eyes away from her miserably. Through his mind came detached fragments of speech. _The honour of the spoken word still holds him . . . Father always does the square thing_ . . . "I am asking you," said Anthony Dexter, "to be my wife. I am offering you the fulfilment of the promise I made so long ago. I am asking you to marry me, to live with me, to be a mother to my son."