"I know what you think of me," she continued. "You think an active life essential to me, that I can't do without it. God knows I loved all you did, I loved your triumphs, I loved to hear you speak and see them listen. You know I loved all that, loved it too much perhaps. But I'll do without it. I'm your wife, your fate's mine. It'll be the braver thing for you to face it, really; I'm ready to face it with you." Still he would only look at her. "We know what we both are," she went on with a little smile. "We're not Mildmays, you and I. But let's try. I must tell you. I can't bear to think that it's partly at least because of me that you won't try, that if I were a different sort of woman it might be much easier for you to try. If it's that at all, imagine what I should feel if--if anything happened such as the doctors are afraid of." "I've chosen my course. I believe the doctors are all wrong." "Do you really believe that?" she asked quickly. He shrugged his shoulders, seeming to say that he would not discuss it. "A great many considerations influence me," he said with a touch of pompousness. "Am I one of them?" she persisted. "Because I don't want to be. I'm ready to share your life, whatever it is." "Are you?" he asked, with something of the same malicious smile that he was wont to bestow on Aunt Maria. "Do you think you could share my life? Do you think you have?" "I know what you mean," she said, flushing a little. "I daresay I've been hard and--and didn't take the pains to understand, and was uncharitable perhaps. Anyhow there'll be no opportunity for any more--any more misunderstandings of that sort." "No; the understanding's clear enough now," said he. She looked at him almost despairingly; he seemed so strangely hostile, so bitterly sensitive to her judgment of him. "You think me," he went on, with his persistent eyes unwaveringly set on her, "a not over-honest mountebank; that's what you and your friends think me." "Oh, I wish I'd never tried to talk to you about it!" she cried. "You take hold of some hasty mood or look of mine and treat it as if it were everything. You know it isn't." "It's there, though." "It never need be, never, never." "You'll forget it all when we're settled down at--where was it?--Torquay or somewhere--in our villa, like two old tabby-cats sitting in the sun? No time to think it all over then? No, only all the hours of every day!" He paused and then added in a low hard voice, "I'm damned if I'll do it. I may have to die, but I'll die standing." His eyes gleamed now, and for the first time they turned from her and roamed over the prospect that lay below Duty Hill. But they were back on her face soon. "No, no," she implored. "Not because of me, for heaven's sake, not because of me!"