"You know what I want to say, Betty," he answered. "You’ve seen for a long time what I was coming to. I held off. I held off because I hadn’t anything to offer you. Even now I haven’t much. I haven’t half enough. If I win this fight I’m in, it won’t give me anything that would make me deserve you. I’ve not been a bit better than I should be." His voice grew tense. "When I come down to brass tacks, when I—I beg your pardon; but what I mean is that when I get to the point of telling you I love you, I see how far I’ve been from being what I should be. I—— Oh, hang it all, Betty!" He put out his hands. "I love you. I’ve never really loved anybody else and never can. If I win this confounded—blessed fight, will you marry me?" She got slowly to her feet: it seemed to Luke minutes before she had stood up and begun her answer. Then she took both his hands. "You don’t have to win the fight to win me, Luke," she said. The realization swept over him. He took her in his arms. He looked in her upturned face—the eyes wide, the sweet, fresh cheeks hot, the lips parted, breathing quickly—and then he felt the blood rush to his head, felt it hammer at his temples. It got into his eyes and blinded him. He ground his lips upon hers. The dull despair of his last months under Leighton commanded a reaction. The rushing changes of the last two days had set his nerves to a speed that would not now cease in whatever physical activities he engaged himself. These things flung him along a new road; they raced him down a way of which he had known but little. As he felt the warmth of her gracious young body next his, he was hurled with such violence down a course so unfamiliar to him that only the thought of losing his race by running it too swiftly could serve to lessen his straining speed. Like a quarter-mile runner stopping himself short in the last hundred yards before the tape, he almost fell as he forced himself to release her. "Your father," he panted. He looked away from her: "I must see him now." Betty did not understand. She was only exalted by this new thing; she was only happy. "Now?" she whispered. "Yes." He looked back at her and, with a white face, smiled. "He has a right to know." He caught her hand, pressed it only as tightly as he dared. "I’ll go to him in the library. Wait for me." §5. Forbes was seated at a round table, engaged in his regular nightly task of reading the editorial-page of the _Evening Star_, nodding his head when he agreed with its generalities and muttering maledictions upon it when it specifically ridiculed the Progressive Party. As Luke came in, Forbes was in the midst of one of the paper’s attacks on progressivism, and his frown seemed to drive his beaked nose into his mustache. "Oh, Huber," he said, without at once relaxing his scowl; "I didn’t know you were here. Come in. Been here long?" Luke could not have guessed how long he had been in the house. "Not very," he ventured.