She shook her head slowly, her eyes still on him. "I know better," she half sighed. "I can see it all over you. At dinner I watched you. You look--look as you did the day you came. You have no idea how you improved, but you are getting back. Oh, I think I know!" she sighed again, and her pretty mouth drooped. "You are in trouble. Mr. Saunders has brought you bad news of business." He saw a loophole of escape from an embarrassing situation, and in desperation he used it. "Things are always going crooked in a bank like ours," he said, avoiding her despondent stare. "Men in my business take risks, you know. Things run smoothly at times, and then--then they may not do so well." "Oh, I'm so sorry," she faltered; "you were getting on beautifully. You--you seemed perfectly happy, too, and I hoped that--" Her voice trailed away in the still room, and he saw her breast under its thin covering rise and fall suddenly. "Don't let it worry you," he said. "How can I help it?" She put the books on the window-sill and raised her hand to her brow. "I know how to fight my _own_ troubles, but yours are too big, too intricate, too far away. What--what are you going to do?" He felt the need of further pretense. He looked down as he answered: "I shall have to take the first train in the morning, and--and--" "Oh!" The simple ejaculation was so full of pain that it checked his tardy subterfuge. He rose to take her in his arms to soothe her, to pledge himself to her forever, but he only stood leaning against the window-frame, the puppet of a thousand warring forces. No, he would not touch her, he told himself; she was to be his wife--she was the sweetest, purest human flower that ever bloomed, and until he was freer from the grime of his past he would not insult her by further intimacy. So far he had not spoken to her of marriage, and he would not do so till he had a better right. "So you really are going?" She had turned pale, and her voice shook as she stared up at him, helplessly. "Yes, but I am coming back just as soon as I possibly can," he said. "Besides, I shall write you, if--if you will let me?" "Why should you say _if_ I will let you? Don't you know--can't you see? Oh, _can't_ you see?" Again the yearning to clasp her in his arms rose to the surface of his inner depths, and he might have given way to it but for the panorama of accusing pictures which was blazing in his brain. "I wish you would try--try to understand _one_ thing, Dolly," he said, pitying himself as much as her. "I have meant everything I have said to you. The little that is good in me loves you with all its force, but I do not want you to--to even trust me--to even count on me--till I have straightened out my affairs in Atlanta. Then--then if all goes well I shall come back, and--and talk to you as I want to talk to you now--but can't." Her brows met in a troubled frown. Her pale lips were drawn tight as if she were suffering physical pain.