“Wait,” he commanded; “let me finish. We won’t say anything about love; we’ll leave that out of it. I have money, and I can take you away from Denver, where you are known, and give you your chance to straighten up. No, I am neither drunk nor crazy, and this is no sudden thing with me. I know what I am proposing, and I want to do it. I have talked with a man who knows you, and he tells me you have no home to go to; no people of your own who would take you in. That is why I am offering you a chance with me.” To his astonishment the girl sprang up and flung herself upon the bed, burying her face in his overcoat and sobbing as if her heart would break. He let her alone; let the fit of weeping exhaust itself. It was a good sign, he decided; it showed that there were still depths that could be touched--deeply touched. But he was wholly unprepared for what followed when she sat up, wiping her eyes and smiling at him through her tears. For this is what she said: “You dear, dear man! Do you know, I’d rather die, right here in this room to-night, than marry you?” “But why?” he demanded. “Don’t you want to get out of this life?” “Not at the price--the price you’d have to pay. Oh, don’t I know? There’s not a corner on God’s green earth you could take me to where there wouldn’t be some man to turn up and say, ‘Hell’s chickens! there’s “Little Irish”--the girl that used to be in Madam Blanche’s in Denver!’ And that isn’t all, either, nor the worst of it. Some day you’ll brace up and go back to the other world--the one you come from. A man can do that whenever he likes, and you’ll do it. And then you’d be tied to a----” “Don’t say it,” he interrupted quickly. “What you are saying only makes me more determined. I shall get a license in the morning, and to-morrow afternoon I shall expect you to be ready to go with me.” He threw a handful of gold coins on the bed. “There is money to square you with Madam Blanche, and to pay for whatever you want to buy. Let me have my coat.” For a moment, while he was struggling into his coat, he thought she had acquiesced. She sat on the bed with her hands tightly clasped and would not look up at him. Dimly he sensed that there was a struggle of some sort making the tapering shapely fingers grip until they were bloodless. Then.... When he won out to the open air of the street his brow was wet and his hands were trembling. There had been a fierce battle in the upper room, and he had come out of it a victor, though only in the strength of a glimpse into the heart of a woman--a glimpse vouchsafed to him in the thick of the struggle. With every wile and weapon she possessed she had fought to make him stay; and but for the saving glimpse which had shown him what her real object was, he might have yielded.