"James is a base hireling," said the caller, blandly. "And as for the capable young woman: do I or do I not recollect a dark night on the German frontier when she was glad enough to call on a sleepy fellow pilgrim to help her wrestle with a particularly thick-headed customs officer?" "If you do, it is not especially kind of you to remind her of it." He looked up quickly, and the masterful soul of the man, for which the clean-cut, square-set jaw and the athletic figure were the outward presentments, put on a mask of deference and humility. "You are hard with me, Elinor--always flinty and adamantine, and that sort. Have you no soft side at all?" She laughed. "The sentimental young woman went out some time ago, didn't she? One can't be an anachronism." "I suppose not. Yet I'm always trying to make myself believe other things about you. Don't you like to be cared for like other women?" "I don't know; sometimes I think I should. But I have had to be the man of the house since father died." "I know," he said. "And it is the petty anxieties that have made you put the woman to the wall. I'm here this morning to save you some of them; to take the man's part in your outsetting, or as much of it as I can. When are you going to give me the right to come between you and all the little worries, Elinor?" She turned from him with a faint gesture of cold impatience. "You are forgetting your promise," she said quite dispassionately. "We were to be friends; as good friends as we were before that evening at Bar Harbor. I told you it would be impossible, and you said you were strong enough to make it possible." He looked at her with narrowing eyes. "It is possible, in a way. But I'd like to know what door of your heart it is that I haven't been able to open." She ignored the pleading and took refuge in a woman's expedient. "If you insist on going back to the beginnings, I shall go back, also--to Abigail and the trunk-packing." He planted himself squarely before her, the mask lifted and the masterful soul asserting itself boldly. "It wouldn't do any good, you know. I am going with you." "To Abigail and the trunk-room?" "Oh, no; to the jumping-off place out West--wherever it is you are going to hibernate." "No," she said decisively; "you must not." "Why?" "My saying so ought to be sufficient reason." "It isn't," he contended, frowning down on her good-naturedly. "Shall I tell you why you don't want me to go? It is because you are afraid." "I am not," she denied. "Yes, you are. You know in your own heart there is no reason why you should continue to make me unhappy, and you are afraid I might over-persuade you." Her eyes--they were the serene eyes of cool gray that take on slate-blue tints in stressful moments--met his defiantly. "If you think that, I withdraw my objection," she said coldly. "Mother and Penelope will be delighted, I am sure."