"Can't you trust me?" He was angry now. "Yes--but not myself," she answered, so low he barely caught the words. He seized her hand. "Then trust me for us both," he said, so instantly gentle and tender that Juliet found it possible to say what a moment before she had thought unwise enough: "Go with him, Ray, dear. I think it is his right." So presently she found herself crossing her own lawn alone, while the two who had just left her went slowly on up the road together. Her heart was beating hard and painfully, for she loved them both, and foresaw for them only the hardest interview of their lives. * * * * * At the end of half an hour Rachel Redding stood again upon her own porch, and Roger Barnes looked up at her from the walk below with heavy eyes. "At least," he said, "you have done what I never would have believed even you could do--convinced me against my will that you are right. You love him--he worships you. There is a promise of life for him in Arizona--with you. I can't forbid the bans. But I shall always believe, what you dare not dispute, that if I had come first--you----" She held out her hand. "That you must not say," she said. "But there is one thing you may say--that you are my best friend, whom I can count on----" "As long as there is life left in me," he answered fervently. He wrung her hand in both his, looked long and steadily up into her face as if his eyes could never leave the lovely outlines showing clear in the light from the windows, then turned away and strode off toward the station without a look behind. XXI.--EVERYBODY GIVES ADVICE "I should do it in brown leather," said Cathcart decidedly, looking about him. He stood in the centre of Anthony's den. The carpenters had gone, the plasterers had finished their work, and the floor had just been swept up. "You're all right as far as you go," observed Anthony, who stood at his elbow, "but you don't go far enough. If you want me to hang these walls with brown leather you'll have to put up the money. I may be sufficiently prosperous to afford the addition to my house, but I haven't reached the stage of covering the walls with cloth-of-gold." "Burlap would be the thing, Tony," Judith suggested. Anthony was surrounded by people--the room was half full of them, elbowing each other about. "Paint the walls," advised Lockwood. "There are imitation-leather papers," said Cathcart, with the air of one condescending to lower a high standard for the sake of those who could not live up to it. "I suppose so," admitted Anthony, "at four dollars a roll. I saw a simple thing on that order that struck me the other day at Heminways'. I thought it might be about forty cents a roll. It was a dollar a square yard. I told them I would think it over. I haven't got through thinking it over yet." "You want a plate-rail," said Wayne Carey. "What for?" "Why, to put plates, and steins, and things on."