“It amounts to this: for a whole year I’ve kept faith with you--honest faith--and every day of that year has been a day of heartburnings and regrets. Your attitude toward your sister is entirely unreasonable. There have been blind wives before this, and they have been happy wives--and mothers, for that matter; at least, their blindness hasn’t necessarily been a bar to happiness. A year ago, if I had spoken, I should have spoken only for myself: now I am speaking for Lucille as well as for myself.” “All of which is entirely beside the question,” was the irritable rejoinder. “I know Lucille, and however far she has allowed herself to go in the matter of learning to care for you or for any man, it’s a sure thing she has never thought of marriage, even as a possibility. If you propose it, two things will happen; she will wake up to the fact that she has been mistaking love for friendship; and she will realize that she has to refuse the love. After that, her life will be nothing but a miserable, repining blank.” “I can’t agree with you at all,” objected the lover, argumentatively ready to defend his own point of view. “If you were the David Vallory I once knew, you would listen to reason; at least, to the extent of giving your sister a voice in ordering her own future. I have come to the fork of the road, David, and I am here to say it to you, face to face. I need Lucille, and she needs me. When the time is fully ripe I shall ask her to be my wife. You put me under bonds of a certain sort a year ago, but now I shall refuse longer to be bound by them; I repudiate them absolutely.” David Vallory sat down, and for a time the silence of the small car interior was broken only by the clash and jangle of a shifting-engine in the upper yard. Finally the decision came. “Oswald, Lucille is my sister, and I am going to stand between her and the life of heartbroken wretchedness you are planning for her. You give me your word that you will not break over while you are both here together, and upon that condition you may stay in Powder Gap as long as you see fit.” Oswald stood up and his lips were pale. “And if I refuse to submit to any such unreasonable and humiliating condition--what then?” David Vallory frowned up at his one-time schoolmate. “You say that you have been bound by your promise of a year ago, but that you now repudiate it; as a man of honor, you are bound by it until I release you.” “You are not answering my question.” “I’ll answer it. The stub train going east leaves here every morning at seven-thirty; I’ll give you a day or two in which to think it over--with the promise still holding good.” “And if, at the end of the day or two, I still refuse to recognize your right to interfere?” “This is not Middleboro; and, as you have remarked, I am not the David Vallory you used to know. If you still decline to listen to reason, you’ll take that train and get out of here--if I have to hog-tie you and throw you into the baggage-car!”