Again Pierre was chilled and inclined to anger. All his fire and fury were deserting him; his intention of taking Jo by storm was disappearing; almost he suspected that she was getting control of the situation. He slyly looked at her dark, forbidding face and weighed the possibilities of the future. Jo, he realized, was secure now in her unusual independent position. Once let him, backed by the good law, which covers the just and the unjust husband with its mantle of authority, get possession of her future and her body, he’d manage—ah! would he not—to utilize the one and degrade the other! "Mam’selle, I come to you as a lone and helpless man. Mam’selle, I must—Mam’selle, I want that you should live the rest of the time of our lives—with me!" Jo was aroused, frightened. She turned her luminous eyes upon the man. "You—you are asking me to marry you, Pierre Gavot?" Gavot, believing that the meaning of his visit had at last brought her to his feet at the first direct shot, replied with a leer: "Well, something like that, Mam’selle." And now Jo’s brows drew close; the eyes were darkened, the lips twitched ominously. As if to emphasize the moment, Nick, abristle and teeth showing, snarled gloomily as he eyed Gavot’s feet. "Something like that?" repeated Jo with a thrill in her tones. "You insult me, Gavot! Something like that. What do you mean?" "God of mercy, Mam’selle," Gavot was genuinely alarmed, "I ask you to—be—my wife." Jo leaned back in her chair. "I wish you’d talk less of the Almighty, Gavot. I reckon the Lord can speak for himself, if men, specially such men as you, get out of his way. It sickens me to have to find the meaning of God through—men. And you ask me to be your wife? You. And I was with Margot when she died!" Gavot’s eyes, for an instant, fell. "Margot was out of her head," he muttered. "She talked madness." "It was more truth than fever, Gavot. Her tongue ran loose—with truth. I know, I know." "Well, then, Mam’selle, ’tis said a second wife reaps the harvest the first wife sowed. I have learned, Mam’selle Jo." "Almost it is a greater insult than what I first thought!" Jo sighed sadly. "But ’tis the best you have to offer—I should not forget that—and some women would lay much stress on the chance you are offering me. One thing Margot said, Gavot, has never passed my lips until now—though often I’ve thought of it. When she’d emptied her poor soul of all that you had poured into it, when she had shriven herself, and was ready to meet her God, the God you had never let her find before because you got in between, she looked at Tom. The poor lad sat huddled up on the foot of the bed watching his mother going forth. ’Jo,’ she whispered, ’when all’s said and done, it paid because of Tom! When I tell God about Tom and what Tom meant, He’ll forgive a lot else. He does with women.’"