And the days that followed--how careful he had been; how matter-of-fact and unemotional; never touching her; never making any sudden motion towards her; never referring to that short ten minutes at the clergyman's; never going near the two rooms the respectable English housekeeper had conducted her to that first evening. "Almost as though he were trying to tame a bird," she had thought half whimsically, after the first days, when the feeling of weariness and fright had worn down and a great relief and great thankfulness had taken its place, that she should never see the boarding-house again with its sneering, insulting landlady, or the office where that man with the eager, shifty, cruel little eyes held rule. And so she had set herself about it, resolutely, though bewildered, to be an anchor to this big, unemotional young man who had so suddenly come out of the background of her existence and was occupying all possible space immediately behind the footlights. She did not at all know what an anchor did, or said, or how it acted. But the very perplexity for some reason or other sent her spirits sky-high. And she pottered about the garden with him, and whizzed about the country in the automobile,--it belonged to the same friend who wanted him to look after the place,--and poked about the queer, rambling house, content to see no one else and talk to no one else and amazed at herself that this should be so. Only once had he made any reference to their situation, when he suggested that it might be as well under the circumstances for her to call him Arthur. "I shall never call you Arthur. Never," she told him hotly. "I loathe the name. Always have. It sounds so deadly respectable." "You don't care for respectability?" His tone was _so_ affable. Ikey considered. "It may have advantages, in some cases. But----" "Then what am I to be called?" She might have retorted that she should call him nothing at all: he never addressed her by any name. Instead, she answered, "Boobles." "Boobles?" "Boobles," she repeated firmly. And then came laughter. Ikey's rages had a way of breaking up in inconvenient bursts of hilarity these days. But what difference did that make now? What difference did anything make? "I don't see," Ikey said to herself desperately, "what makes me so stupid. I'm afflicted with chronic mental nearsightedness. Most distressing. This is really a tragedy I'm mixed up in--a tragedy. And tragedy's a thing I never cared for." She collapsed miserably on a bench and stared at the letter. "It's queer how tragedy and going to sea give you the same feeling." It was not pity--oh, no--that had made him want to marry her. And it was not love. And it was not because he needed an anchor. Not he. He was not that kind. It was simply because she was his opportunity. Yes; that was the word. And she had never suspected. Not that afternoon in the vacant lot, when he had inquired so exhaustingly as to her bank account.