"You're making it fearfully hard for me, and the worst of it is that you don't seem to know it. You think I am a mining crank, like all the rest of them, and so I am; but there was method in my madness. I never cared overmuch for money until I came to know what it is to love a woman who has too much of it." There was manifestly no reply to be made to such a pointless speech as this, and when he resumed his circumambulatory march she began to turn the leaves of the book again. When it became evident that he was not going to elucidate, she said, "Meaning Connie?" "No, not meaning Connie." He had drifted around to the back of her chair again. "I wish you'd put that book away for a few minutes. It owls me." "I will, if you will stop circling about and talking down on me from the ceiling. It's dreadfully distressing." He laughed and drew up a chair facing her; drew it up until the arm of it touched hers. "It's a stand-off," he said, with cheerful effrontery; "only I didn't mean my part of it. Let's see, where were we? You said, 'Meaning Connie,' and I said, 'No, not meaning Connie.' I meant some one else. Until I met her, the Little Myriad was merely a hole in the ground, not so very different from other holes in the ground except that it was mine--and it wasn't the Little Myriad then, either. After that, it got its name changed, and its mission, too. From that day its business was to make it possible for me to go to her and say, 'I love you; you, yourself, and not your money. I've money enough of my own.'" She heard him through with the face of a graven image. "And now?" "And now I can't do it; I can never do it, I'm afraid. The Little Myriad has gone back on me, and I'm nearer flat broke to-day than I've ever been." "But this unfortunate young person who has too much money--she is young, isn't she?--has she nothing to say about it?" Bartrow answered his own thought rather than her question. "She couldn't be happy with everybody saying she'd staked her husband." "Has she told you that?" "No; but it's so,--you know it's so." Bartrow was no juggler in figures of speech, and his fictitious third person threatened to become unmanageable. Her smile was good to look upon. "I don't know anything of the kind. I think she would be very foolish to let such an absurd thing make her unhappy--supposing any one should be unkind enough to say it." "They would say it, and I'd hear of it; and then there'd be trouble." "But you say you love her; isn't your love strong enough to rise above such things? You think the sacrifice would be hers, but it wouldn't; it would be yours." "I don't see how you make that out." Myra's heart sank within her. It hurt her immeasurably to be driven to plead her own cause, but the money-fact was inexorable; and the look in Bartrow's eyes was her warrant when she dared to read it.