HER face in the darkness, and about them the green gloom of the Square, were all that he knew of the time. Not far from them, like murals on the night, went the people, that little lighted stream of people, down the white steps and along the gray drives. At first he could say nothing to her. He seized at her hand as he had seized upon it that night in Chicago, but then he remembered and let her hand fall; and at last he blurted out a consuming question: “Where is he?” “Who?” Lory asked surprisingly, and understood, and still more surprisingly replied: “Bunchy! He’s gone to New York.” This city’s name the Inger repeated stupidly, and as if it made no answer to anything. “Just for a few days,” she explained, “before he goes home.” “Home!” To tell the truth she seemed not to be thinking very much about Bunchy. “I told him I’d never marry him—not in fifty hundred years. And he went home.” He considered this incredulously. “Couldn’t you tell him that without comin’ clear to Washington to do it?” he demanded. “No,” she said. “There was the money. Why didn’t you tell me you’d give Dad that money?” He tried to answer her, but all the while this miracle was taking him to itself: Bunchy had gone. “I guess because it sounded like a square deal, when I only done it to devil Bunchy some,” he told her. “Is that all you done it for?” He looked at her swiftly. Was that all that he had done it for? “Is it?” she said. “I donno,” he answered truthfully. “It was some of it.” “I wish,” she said, “I wish’t I knew.” With that he moved a little toward her, and tried to see her face. “Why?” he asked. She turned away and said nothing. And when she did that, he caught his breath and stooped to her. “You tell me why you wish’t you knew,” he bade her. “Oh well,” she said—and she was breathless too—“if you done it to help me—get away—then I shouldn’t feel so bad about goin’ to the hut.” “About comin’ to me?” “About makin’ you do all this for me!” she cried. “I’m sick over it. I don’t know how to tell you....” He wondered if it was possible that she did not understand. “I done the only thing I could think to do,” she said. “There wasn’t anybody else....” “Do you get the idea,” he demanded, “that I’m ever going to forget how you said that to me that first night? I was drunk—but I knew when you said that. And then—” “Don’t,” she said. “How can I help it?” he asked bitterly. “I made fool enough of myself that night—” “_Don’t_,” she begged. “—so’s you never can forget it,” he finished. “And so’s I never can. If it hadn’t been for that—” “What then?” she asked. And now he did not answer, but looked away from her, and so it was she who made him tell. “What then?” she said again. “_Would_ you have liked me then,” he burst out, “before that night?” She said—and nothing could have swept him like the simplicity and honesty of this: “But you never come down to town once after that morning on the horse.” “How did you know that?” he cried.