Only a step, but to the girl he seemed somehow to draw much closer. The atmosphere of the room was somehow strained to tension. She saw that his eyes, although they did not waver, softened, and, to fill a pause of which she began to be afraid, she heard herself repeating: "And you've won?" "That," said Stainton, "is for you to say--Muriel." It was the first time he had called her by her given name. Her eyes fell. She lowered the violets and, looking only at them, raised a hand to finger them. The hand shook. "For me?" she asked. If there is one thing in which men are more alike than another, it is the manner of their asking women to marry them. Generally it adds to many pretences the cruelty of suspense. Stainton was not unusual. "I have won my fight--yes," he said. "I have got the means. Can I gain the end? It's you who must tell me that." She saw now. "How can I help?" she faltered. "I wanted Life," he repeated, and wished that he could see her face. "Life means more than money. Money will protect it, secure it; but Life means Love. Long ago I knew your mother." Very simply, but directly, he told her how he had loved that other Muriel. His morbid fears he did not describe, but his first romance he sketched with a gentleness that, while she, her heart steadied, looked up at his reposed strength and remembered all the stories that she had heard of his adventurous career, brought a quick mist of tears to her eyes. "Do you remember," he asked, when his story was finished, "how rudely I looked at you when I first saw you in the Metropolitan Opera House?" "It wasn't rude," she said. "You must have thought it so then." "I--I didn't know what to think--exactly." "Well, now you know. It was an astonishing resemblance that made me stare at you." Her nether lip trembled. "I didn't know my mother," she said. "No," said Stainton, "but you are very like her." He waited a moment and then, as her eyes were lowered, went on: "That was a boyish love of mine for her. It was really not love at all--only the rough sketch for what might have been, but never was, a finished picture. But I went away, when your mother repulsed me, with the likeness of her in my heart. I wanted love; I worked to be fit to win love and to keep it once I had won it. Then I came back and saw in that box at the opera the living original of the dream-woman that had all those years been with me." He came another step nearer. "I arranged to meet you," he said, "and I knew at last I was really in love. I want to be to you what your mother would not let me be to her. It is you whom I love, not a memory. I love you. I was young then and didn't know. Now I am still young--I have kept myself young--but I _know_." He bent forward and paused. Then, "Muriel," he said. The girl drew back. She put her hand before her eyes. The violets rolled to the floor. "I--I can't tell," she stammered. "I didn't expect--I never thought----" Even this Stainton had foreseen.