"Four days and an afternoon, to be exact. What's that got to do with it, when you are made for me?" "Don't you like this, Helmeth?" He caught me to him with that frank delight in the pressure of his arm about my body, the feel of his cheek against mine that was as fresh to me as water in a wilderness. "It's not this I'm objecting to, but the trouble I shall have doing without you." He let me go at that, as though he would not add the persuasion of his touch to what he had to say. "The truth is I've no business to ask a woman to marry me for the next two years. I'm pledged to this Mexican proposition. I've staked all I have on it, and I've asked other men to put their money in, and I can't go back on it. I shall have to be back and forth between London and New York and the mines, for at least a couple of years. If it wasn't for wanting you so ... but now that I've found you again, I know there's no going on without you!" He turned his face toward me that I might see the lines of anxious thought there, the buffetings and disappointings, and through it all, the plain hunger of the man for his natural mate. I saw that and I didn't flinch from it. I took his face between my hands and drew it down to my breast. "I'm under contract for the next year," I told him. "I signed just before I left ... what does it all matter? Can't we be just ... engaged." "We'd be engaged to be married. And I couldn't take you to Mexico on an engagement." "I'm under contract," I told him again. "You mean to say that you'd go on acting after we were married?" It isn't worth while retailing what we said after that. It has been said so many times. It was the same thing that Tommy said, better put, more fully. He was ready, you understand, to make concession to my liking for the stage, to feel himself sincerely a poor substitute for what I had got for myself out of living, but there it was at the end, that he couldn't make for his own work the concessions he demanded of mine. "We would have to live in Mexico," he said at last. "That's incontrovertible. And besides there are the kiddies to think of. Their mother wouldn't want them brought up in the atmosphere of the stage." He had me there. I thought of Miss Dean and Griffin, of the Cecelia Brunes I had known, and Polatkin tracing the outline of my figure with his fat forefinger. "I wouldn't either," and my frank admission of it brought us out of the atmosphere of controversy to the community of our love again. "You understand, don't you, that I feel even more obligation to her _now_." I nodded. I understood fully that obstinate trace of disloyalty that came of his having given himself to what she wouldn't approve of, to what he couldn't for decency's sake admit of giving her daughters. "I know what people think of the life of the stage," I agreed; "and I know what's worse, that most of it is true. Not that it need to be; but it has got in the habit of being so."