"Stuff! It _will_ do, and you must use it. Who would ever know it? And I shall not care how blackly you show me up. I deserve it. If I was the cause of your hating love so much that you failed with your lovers on the old lines, I certainly ought to be willing to be the means of your succeeding on lines that had never been tried before." "Generous girl!" He bent over--he had not to bend far--and kissed her. Then he rose excitedly and began to walk the floor, with his hands in his pockets, and his head dropped forward. He broke into speech: "I could disguise it so that nobody would ever dream of it. I'll just take a hint from ourselves. How would it do to have had the girl actually reject him? It never came to that with us; and instead of his being a howling outside swell that was rather condescending to her, suppose I have him some sort of subordinate in her father's business? It doesn't matter much what; it's easy to arrange such a detail. She could be in love with him all the time, without even knowing it herself, or, at least, not knowing it when he offers himself; and she could always be vaguely hoping or expecting that he would come to time again." "That's what I did," said his wife, "and you hadn't offered yourself either." Maxwell stopped, with an air of discomfiture and disappointment. "You wouldn't like me to use that point, then?" "What a simpleton! Of course I should! I shouldn't care if all the world knew it." "Ah, well, we won't give it to Pinney, anyway; but I really think it could be done without involving our own facts. I should naturally work farther and farther away from them when the thing got to spinning. Just take a little color from them now and then. I might have him hating her all the way through, or, supposing he hated her, and yet doing all sorts of nice little things, and noble big things for her, till it came out about her father's crime, and then--" He stopped again with a certain air of distaste. "That would be rather romantic, wouldn't it?" his wife asked. "That was what I was thinking," he answered. "It would be confoundedly romantic." "Well, I'll tell you," said Louise; "you could have them squabbling all the way through, and doing hateful things to one another." "That would give it the cast of comedy." "Well?" "And that wouldn't do either." "Not if it led up to the pathos and prettiness of their reconciliation in the end? Shakespeare mixes the comic and the tragic all through!" "Oh yes, I know that--" "And it would be very effective to leave the impression of their happiness with the audience, so that they might have strength to get on their rubbers and wraps after the tremendous ordeal of your Haxard death-scene."