"No. Hear me out. I know what's the matter. You don't trust me. You're afraid, if you marry me, that I'll let you down--as my father let my mother down. But I won't! I swear it." He stood still and, slipping his arm from under hers, took both her hands in his and held them tightly. "If you'll marry me, Ann, I promise you that I'll give up gambling--every form of it--from this day forth." "You couldn't!" she broke in hastily. "I could do anything--for you," he answered simply. "Because I love you." There was something very touching in the boyish declaration. Ann looked up and saw his face in the moonlight, white and rather stern. It made her think of the face of some young knight of bygone days taking a sacred vow before he set forth to seek and find the Holy Grail. He bent down to her. "Ann, darling," he said gently. "I love you so much. Won't you marry me?" She felt her heart contract. He had asked her many times before--sometimes half jestingly, sometimes with a sudden imperious passion that would fain have swept everything before it. But this was different. There was a gravity, an earnestness in his speech which she could not lightly brush aside. Alone here, under the wide sky, with only God's open spaces round them, it seemed to her as though his question and her answer to it must partake of the same solemnness as vows exchanged within the hallowed walls of a sanctuary. She wished intensely that she could give him the answer he desired. And, beyond that, she felt the urge of Virginia's trust in her. Here was her chance. At a word from her he was willing to renounce the one thing for which he craved--the thing that had wrecked his father's life, and which might some day wreck his own. Ought she to say that word--promise to marry him, even though she had no love to give him? Her mind seemed to be going round and round in a maze of uncertainty and doubt. And then suddenly the remembrance of what Lady Susan had said rushed over her: _"A woman may throw her whole life's happiness into the scales, and still fail to turn the balance. Without love--the love that can forgive seventy times seven, and then not be tired--she'll certainly fail_." The words steadied her. "_Without love_--" and she had no love to give Tony. Not the love that a woman should bring to the man she will call husband. Out of the turmoil of her mind this one thought emerged clear and irrefutable. And in that moment, for good or ill, her decision was taken. "Tony." She spoke very gently, sore at heart for the pain she knew she must inflict. "I must say no, dear. If I loved you, I'd say yes very gladly. But I don't love you--not like that." "And you won't marry me?" "No, I can't marry you."