He tried again, and this time he drew the moral. "Don't you see, I'm a marked man--marked for life." He hesitated, then pushed on. "You're fine and clean and generous--what a good father and mother, and all this have made you." He swept his hand round in a wide gesture to include the sun and the hills and all the brave life of the open. "If I come too near you, don't you see I taint you? I'm a man who was shut up because--" "Fiddlesticks! You're a man who has been done a wrong. You mustn't grow morbid over it. After all, you've been found innocent." "That isn't what counts. I've been in the penitentiary. Nothing can wipe that out. The stain of it's on me and can't be washed away." She turned on him with a little burst of feminine ferocity. "How dare you talk that way, Dave Sanders! I want to be proud of you. We all do. But how can we be if you give up like a quitter? Don't we all have to keep beginning our lives over and over again? Aren't we all forever getting into trouble and getting out of it? A man is as good as he makes himself. It doesn't matter what outside thing has happened to him. Do you dare tell me that my dad wouldn't be worth loving if he'd been in prison forty times?" The color crept into his face. "I'm not quitting. I'm going through. The point is whether I'm to ask my friends to carry my load for me." "What are your friends for?" she demanded, and her eyes were like stars in a field of snow. "Don't you see it's an insult to assume they don't want to stand with you in your trouble? You've been warped. You're eaten up with vain pride." Joyce bit her lip to choke back a swelling in her throat. "The Dave we used to know wasn't like that. He was friendly and sweet. When folks were kind to him he was kind to them. He wasn't like--like an old poker." She fell back helplessly on the simile she had used with her father. "I don't blame you for feeling that way," he said gently. "When I first came out I did think I'd play a lone hand. I was hard and bitter and defiant. But when I met you-all again--and found you were just like home folks--all of you so kind and good, far beyond any claims I had on you--why, Miss Joyce, my heart went out to my old friends with a rush. It sure did. Maybe I had to be stiff to keep from being mushy." "Oh, if that's it!" Her eager face, flushed and tender, nodded approval. "But you've got to look at this my way too," he urged. "I can't repay your father's kindness--yes, and yours too--by letting folks couple your name, even in friendship, with a man who--" She turned on him, glowing with color. "Now that's absurd, Dave Sanders. I'm not a--a nice little china doll. I'm a flesh-and-blood girl. And I'm not a statue on a pedestal. I've got to live just like other people. The trouble with you is that you want to be generous, but you don't want to give other folks a chance to be. Let's stop this foolishness and be sure-enough friends--Dave."