"I know you think I am cruel," she said, in the same calm, considerate tone she had used throughout. "But I never gave you any encouragement, Frank--not in the way you wanted or expected. You were the only person I knew who was the least bit cultivated and nice and travelled and out of the commonplace. I can't tell you how much you brightened my life here, or how glad I was when you came or how sorry I was when you went away--but it wasn't love, Frank--not the love you wished for or the love I feel I have the power to give." "Why did you let me go on then?" he broke out, "I getting deeper and deeper into it and you knowing all the time it never could come to anything? Just because no words were said, did that make you blind? If you were such a friend of mine as you said you were, wouldn't it have been kinder to have shown me the door and tell me straight out it was hopeless and impossible? Oh, Florence, you took my love when you wanted it, like a person getting warm at a fire, and now when you don't need it any longer you tell me quite unconcernedly that it is all over between us!" "It would sound so heartless to tell you the real truth, Frank," she said. "Oh, let me hear it!" he said. "I'm desperate enough for anything --even for that, I suppose." "I knew it would end the way you wanted it, Frank," she said. "You were getting to mean more and more to me. I did not love you exactly and I did not worry a particle when you were away, but I sort of acquiesced in what seemed to be the inevitable. I know I am horribly to blame, but I took it for granted we'd drift on and on--and this time, if you had asked me, I had made up my mind to say 'yes.'" She said this last word in almost a whisper, frightened at the sight of Frank's pale face. She ran over to him, and throwing her arms around his neck kissed him again and again. "We'll always be friends, Frank," she said. "Always, always!" He made no movement to return her caresses. Her kisses humiliated him to the quick. He pushed her away from him, and when he spoke it was with dignity and gentleness. "I was wrong to reproach you," he said. "I can appreciate what a difference all this money makes to you. It has lifted you into another world--a world where I cannot hope to follow you, but I can be man enough to say that I understand--that I acquiesce-- without bitterness." "I never liked you so well as I do now, Frank," she said. "We will say nothing more about it," he said. "I couldn't blame you because you don't love me, could I? I ought rather instead to thank you--thank you for so much you have given me these two years past, your friendship, your intimacy, your trust. That it all came to nothing was neither your fault nor mine. It was your uncle's for dying and leaving you sky-scrapers!"