"Gratitude comes hard to you," she said. "There is no cause for it in anything I have ever done. You may be sure it was not to please you at all, but to gratify something in myself that demanded satisfaction. Now, please explain to me what you mean by your extraordinary summary of things we know too well, and how I have offended you when I am really your friend--yours, and "--She stopped, a smile flitted over her face and was gone; it revealed for the unnamed person a gentleness and an affection that perhaps she did not care to have her tones betray. "Yes, you have offended me," he said. "I have no right to comment on your actions in general." "None whatever." "But what I do have a right to demand is an explanation from you of conduct so strange as to be unaccountable." She flushed a little. "It's not pleasant," she answered, "when one has done the best that opened up to be told that it's unaccountable conduct." "Then it was you? I was sure of it." She looked at him earnestly. "Why should there be any beating about the bush?" she answered. "I should like it better if you need never have known; but, since you were sure to find it out sooner or later, it might as well come now. What I have done is wise and right, the most satisfactory thing to me, and to others wiser than I. But I wish you would never speak of it." "Never speak of your coming forward with your whole fortune to make up the loss that this fellow's claim will be to us? Never speak of it!" cried Archdale. "And accept it? From you? You certainly have a flattering opinion of me." "If it were like any business losses," she said, "it would be different. But this is something nobody could have been prepared for; it needs something outside of the routine to meet it." She waited a moment. "Will you put your case, as you said you were going to do?" she asked. "It will make it clearer, and you will see that there is nothing extraordinary. I think you need not say anything more about--about us, that is all understood. Go on from there."