Marjorie was a perfectly intelligent girl. She knew very well that Pennington was, at last, telling her the outlines of his own pitiful story. And he was leaving the decision in her hands. She sat quietly for awhile, and tried to think. It was hard to think, because there was a queer, hazy feeling in her head, and her hands were hot. She had felt unusually excited and energetic and gay earlier in the day, but that was all gone, and only the hazy feeling left. She did not want to move, or, particularly, to speak. She wondered if a trip she had made that afternoon before to a little swampy place, where she had sat and strung berries for an hour, had been bad for her. But there was Pennington--he looked very large, suddenly, and then seemed to fade away far off for a minute, and have to be focused with an effort--and he had to be answered. "I think," she said hesitatingly, "that he ought to do what seemed to him right, without thinking of his feelings, or--or any one else's." "But that's just the trouble. He couldn't see which _was_ right." Marjorie tried to focus harder than ever. She wanted to be unselfish, and tell him the thing that was right to do, at any cost--though she had not realized how much Pennington's help and society had been to her. She felt a terror at the idea of his going, the more because she felt ill. But that didn't count--that mustn't count. You have no right to let a man stay where he may fall in love with you, merely because you need him for a maiden aunt or something of the sort. And that was the ultimate and entire extent of her affection for him, strong though it had come to be. "I think--I think that man had better go back to the place where he had really belonged at first," she said in a low voice. "No matter how much the girl missed him, or needed him, she had no right to want him to be hurt by staying near her." "You really think that?" he said. "Yes," she answered. And then incoherently, "Oh, Mr. Pennington, I do want to be good!" She meant that she had done enough wrong, in acting as she had toward Francis in the first place. She felt now, very strongly, that all the trouble had come from her cowardice when Francis came home. She should have shut her teeth and gone through the thing, no matter what her personal feelings had been at first. It would all have come out right then. She knew now that she and Francis, the plunge once taken, could have stood each other. And she would have kept her faith. She had learned the meaning of honor. "You are good," said Pennington in a moved tone. "Then--I have my answer. Yes--I'll go back." She leaned her heavy head on the chair-back again. He seemed once more suddenly remote. "I--I wish you weren't going," she said, only half conscious of what she said.