“No, I'd cut out my tongue rather than let her know. You told me when we last met that even a bare report of our engage--our love for each other right now would harm your plans. Do you think that I'd let a horror like this come up against you? Even if you declared it was true, I'd say it was a lie! I'd say I cared for some one else. They declare it was Fred Walton, anyway, because he left so suddenly. I've told them it wasn't--told them and told them, but they won't believe me. They may think what they please, but they sha'n't say it was _you!_” “Fred Walton!” Galt's mind galloped on. “They blamed it on that reckless, devil-may-care fellow, and it would be like Dora's magnanimity to deny the truth for all time. But should he let her?” A storm of incongruous tenderness now swept over him as he stood in the coign of immunity she had preserved for him and regarded the sweet, stricken creature before him. He laughed aloud in sheer derision of the escape she was offering him, and for one blind instant he actually believed in his own manhood. “Leave you?” he said, warmly, and he took her hands into his, and, although she firmly resisted, he drew her into his arms and tenderly kissed her cold, flower-like lips. “Let another man, and a scamp like Fred Walton, have his name coupled in that way with yours? Never! I want you, Dora. I'd be a miserable dog, even if I succeeded with my paltry enterprise by leaving you! No, I'll come here to-morrow and we'll be married, as we ought to have been months and months ago. Now, go to bed, and let me see roses on your pretty cheeks in the morning.” “You are speaking without thought--without knowledge of yourself.” The girl sighed as she drew away from his embrace and forcibly put down his detaining hands. “You see, I know you, Kenneth, better than you know yourself. You love me in a way, I am sure; but when it was all over, and you'd paid the debt you think you owe me, you'd blame me for being the blight to your prospects that I would be. Listen! What is done is done. Because I am disgraced is no reason you should be. You are a man whose ambition is his life. Married to me, and hampered by the name I now bear, you'd not only fail in your present enterprise, but you would be held down to the end of life. Oh, I know you so well--so very well! The praise and adulation of the prominent men and women whose friendship you have are the very life-blood of your being. I've known you had this weakness for a long time, but I had to bear with it as a natural shortcoming.”