"You have been afraid every day lest I should begin a second time to press you for an answer, haven't you?" She could not thrust and parry with him. They were past all that. "Yes," she admitted briefly. "You break my heart, Elinor," he said, after a long pause. "But"--with a sudden tightening of the lips--"I'm not going to break yours." She understood him, and her eyes filled quickly with the swift shock of gratitude. "If you had made a study of womankind through ten lifetimes instead of a part of one, you could not know when and how to strike truer and deeper," she said; and then, softly: "Why can't you make me love you, Brookes?" He took his foot from the brake-pedal, and for ten seconds the released car shot down the slope unhindered. Then he checked the speed and answered her. "A little while ago I should have said I didn't know; but now I do know. It is because you love David Kent: you loved him before I had my chance." She did not deny the principal fact, but she gave him his opportunity to set it aside if he could--and would. "Call it foolish, romantic sentiment, if you like. Is there no way to shame me out of it?" He shook his head slowly. "You don't mean that." "But if I say that I do; if I insist that I am willing to be shamed out of it." His smile was that of a brother who remembers tardily to be loving-kind. "I shall leave that task for some one who cares less for you and for your true happiness than I do, or ever shall. And it will be a mighty thankless service that that 'some one' will render you." "But I ought to be whipped and sent to bed," she protested, almost tearfully. "Do you know what I have done?--how I have----" She could not quite put it in words, even for him, and he helped her generously, as before. "I know what Kent hasn't done; which is more to the point. But he will do it fast enough if you will give him half a chance." "No," she said definitively. "I say yes. One thing, and one thing only, has kept him from telling you any time since last autumn: that is a sort of finical loyalty to me. I saw how matters stood when he came aboard of our train at Gaston--I'm asking you to believe that I didn't know it beforeand I saw then that my only hope was to make a handfast friend of him. And I did it." "I believe you can do anything you try to do," she said warmly. This time his smile was a mere grimace. "You will have to make one exception, after this; and so shall I. And since it is the first of any consequence in all my mounting years, it grinds. I can't throw another man out of the window and take his place." "If you were anything but what you are, you would have thrown him out of the window another way," she rejoined.