He rose and walked up and down the room impatiently as if his thoughts irked him. Finally he paused before the window where a scarlet geranium blossomed on the sill, and turned a singularly flushed face upon the girl. For a dazed instant she wondered with a thrill of painfully remembered fear if he had been drinking. “You will be startled at what I am about to say to you,” he said, in a changed voice. “I should have laughed at the idea if anyone had suggested it to me a week ago. But—I want you to marry me. I want you to be my wife. No! don’t answer; don’t refuse! You haven’t thought what it means. You cannot consider the matter so suddenly. But this much you can understand, I will give you this place on our wedding-day—to do with as you like, and I will attach no conditions to the gift.” Barbara had not removed her fascinated gaze from his face. She felt like one dreaming fantastically and struggling unavailingly to awake. “Perhaps you do not realize what you have asked of me,” she said at last. “But—I will not sell myself for this farm. That is what you have asked me to do.” Her eyes sparkled blue fire; her lips curled disdainfully. “Don’t be a fool,” he said roughly. “I want nothing of the sort. I want you—you! I need you. I am more sure of it now than ever.” He took three steps toward her, his rugged face alive with determination—the grim determination which had wrested all that he possessed from the grip of a hostile world. “When I want anything,” he said doggedly, “I always get it. Didn’t you know that? I want you.” “You’ll not get me—ever!” cried Barbara. She knew it must be war to the bitter end between them, and she flung the gage of battle full in his face with fine recklessness. “You may take everything I have, if you can. But you’ll not get me!” He stood up and buttoned his frock coat over his white waistcoat. “I’ll not take your answer to-day,” he said, quite unmoved by her anger. “I had no intention of doing so.” He strode to the door without another look at her, signalled his coachman, stepped into his closed carriage, shut the door hard behind him and rolled away, with a smooth whir of shining wheels. V “I’LL give her time to think before I see her again,” Jarvis decided, as his swift-stepping bays carried him along through the April rain. He dropped the window of his brougham and drew in deep satisfying breaths of the moist air. He was glad that she had not yielded supinely, as a weaker woman might have done. There was to his mind something heroic, splendid in her attitude as she defied him. For the first time in his life, Stephen Jarvis felt the stir of half-awakened passion; and the savage within his breast, never wholly eliminated or even tamed by an imperfect civilization, exulted at the thought of the imminent conflict of wills, the flight, the pursuit, the inevitable capture. “I’ll give her time to think—to be afraid!” he repeated; “then——”