But Morgan was a master of the strategy of surprise. His jaw did not drop in stricken amazement. His left hand, holding the glove just drawn from the right, did not clench in dramatic tensity. His eyes did not even smoulder into that suppressed rage which mischievously she used to tease into them for the pleasure of seeing them snap. If anything, the prominent out-thrust of the clean-cut jaw was less emphatic than usual, and the girl felt the sinking helplessness of one who, keyed to a hard battle, launches the attack and encounters no opposition. Morgan had seen the wild, almost irrational, terror of her eyes, and they had silenced argument. For once he recognized a defeat that he could avoid only by an ungenerous victory to which he could not bring himself, and he had no reproach because he could see that, in her effort to perform her promise, she had goaded herself to the breaking point. His face showed every thoroughbred and manly quality of its blood as he inquired, with as great a deference as though her sudden announcement came with entire reasonableness: "Are you sure--you can't?" When she had nodded her head miserably, Morgan argued his cause. He talked with a quiet and earnest eagerness but without reproach, as if he were for the first time pleading his love. But the arguments held nothing new. She herself had lain awake at night repeating them until they were like parrot reiterations. They interposed no answer to the monstrous fact that a marriage which she faced in such unwillingness would be a thing that divorced the heart from the body. That she had so long beguiled herself into believing it possible, filled her now with self-scorn, but to the untimeliness of her decision he offered no protest. They talked, all things considered, with surprising calmness, and at length Morgan glanced down and, seeing on the table near his hand the plans for the house they had meant to build, picked them up absently, glanced at them and tossed them back. It was the gesture of accepting a finality. "I suppose, Anne," he said, with a rather more than merely decent assumption of whatever fault existed, "I've refused to see the truth because I was blindly selfish, but I couldn't seek to hold you--if it costs you both happiness and self-respect." He paused and then added. "I ask only one thing, now. Don't make this decision final. Think it over for three months--" "Morgan dear," she interrupted in a gasping voice, "for more than three months, I've thought of nothing else." "I know." The gentleness of his speech was the more telling by its contrast with his aggressive habit of self-assertion. "But you were thinking then with a sense of being bound. Complete freedom may make a difference. At least leave me that hope." "I'm afraid," she faltered, "I'm very certain." "Anyway," he reminded her, as he forced a rueful smile, "it will be easier to tell your mother in that fashion. She is on my side, you know."