Peter rose hastily from his chair and walked to the window, standing there with his back to Mrs. Caldwell. Very rigidly he stood, his hands at his side, tightly closed. When he finally turned again into the room, his face was white. "Why do you tell me that now--now that it's too late?" he asked. And his voice shook with the question. At something in that white face of his, at something in his unsteady voice, Mrs. Caldwell grew very gentle: "Because I'm a blundering old woman, Peter dear. But, since I have blundered, let us talk frankly. I did intend you to marry Sheila. I plotted and planned for it from the time she was a little girl in your rhetoric class. I believed that in a marriage with you lay her chance to be both a happy and a wonderful woman. And then--Ted married her instead! But there's still something you can do for her. You can watch over her when I'm gone, Peter. You can put out a saving hand now and then, if you see she needs it. When I'm dead--and that will be soon, my dear--you'll be the only person in the world who understands her. If I can feel that you'll always be there ready to help her, I can die in peace. Bottled up genius is a dangerous thing. Sometimes I am afraid for Sheila! But if you'll promise to watch over her for me, I can die with my heart at rest." "There is nothing I would not do for you or for her!" he said. "I know that, Peter. What wonder that I had my dreams about you?" "They were dreams, just dreams," he responded, and now he was speaking more easily. "I wasn't the right man for Sheila after all. If I had been, she would have realized it; she wouldn't have married some one else." "How could she realize it--at twenty? And she was barely twenty when she married. Peter, there's a moment in a girl's life when, consciously or not, her whole being, soul and body, cries out for love. And if a man is at hand then--any presentable man--to answer, '_I_ am love,' she believes him. That moment came to Sheila--and Ted was there!" "Oh," cried Peter, "Oh, surely there was more to it than that! Surely there was real love!" And when she did not answer, he repeated earnestly, "Surely there was real love!" "You plead for Ted?" asked Mrs. Caldwell with a touch of irony. "I plead for her. Ted doesn't matter, and I don't matter. But _Sheila_--Oh, I can't bear that she should have only a second-rate thing, an imitation. I can't bear that."