"Tell me all about it, daughter," she adjured; and when the tale was told, she patted the bowed head tenderly and spoke the words of healing.

"You did altogether right, Ellie, dear; I--I am proud of you, daughter.

And if, as you say, you were the only one to do it, that doesn't matter; it was all the more necessary. Are you sure he gave it up?"

Elinor rose and stood with clasped hands beside her mother's chair; a very pitiful and stricken half-sister of the self-reliant, dependable young woman who had boasted herself the head of the household.

"I have no means of knowing what he has done," she said slowly. "But I know the man. He has turned back."

There was a tap at the door and a servant was come to say that Mr. Brookes Ormsby was waiting with his auto-car. Was Miss Brentwood nearly ready?

Elinor said, "In a minute," and when the door closed, she made a confidante of her mother for the first time since her childhood days.

"I know what you have suspected ever since that summer in New Hampshire, and it is true," she confessed. "I do love him--as much as I dare to without knowing whether he cares for me. Must I--may I--say yes to Brookes Ormsby without telling him the whole truth?"

"Oh, my dear! You couldn't do that!" was the quick reply.

"You mean that I am not strong enough? But I am; and Mr. Ormsby is manly enough and generous enough to meet me half-way. Is there any other honest thing to do, mother?"

Mrs. Hepzibah shook her head deliberately and determinedly, though she knew she was shaking the Ormsby millions into the abyss of the unattainable.

"No; it is his just due. But I can't help being sorry for him, Ellie. What will you do if he says it doesn't make any difference?"

The blue-gray eyes were downcast.

"I don't know. Having asked so much, and accepted so much from him--it shall be as he says, mother."

The afternoon had been all that a summer afternoon on the brown highlands can be, and the powerful touring car had swept them from mile to mile over the dun hills like an earth-skimming dragon whose wing-beat was the m.u.f.fled, explosive thud of the motor.

Through most of the miles Elinor had given herself up to silent enjoyment of the rapture of swift motion, and Ormsby had respected her mood, as he always did. But when they were on the high hills beyond the mining-camp of Megilp, and he had thrown the engines out of gear to brake the car gently down the long inclines, there was room for speech.

"This is our last spin together on the high plains, I suppose," he said.

"Your mother has fixed upon to-morrow for our return to town, hasn't she?"

Elinor confirmed it half-absently. She had been keyed up to face the inevitable in this drive with Ormsby, and she was afraid now that he was going to break her resolution by a dip into the commonplaces.

"Are you glad or sorry?" he asked.

Her reply was evasive.

"I have enjoyed the thin, clean air and the freedom of the wide horizons.

Who could help it?"

"But you have not been entirely happy?"

It was on her lips to say some conventional thing about the constant jarring note in all human happiness, but she changed it to a simple "No."

"May I try if I can give the reason?"

She made a reluctant little gesture of a.s.sent; some such signal of acquiescence as Marie Antoinette may have given the waiting headsman.

"You have been afraid every day lest I should begin a second time to press you for an answer, haven't you?"

She could not thrust and parry with him. They were past all that.

"Yes," she admitted briefly.

"You break my heart, Elinor," he said, after a long pause. "But"--with a sudden tightening of the lips--"I'm not going to break yours."

She understood him, and her eyes filled quickly with the swift shock of grat.i.tude.

"If you had made a study of womankind through ten lifetimes instead of a part of one, you could not know when and how to strike truer and deeper,"

she said; and then, softly: "Why can't you make me love you, Brookes?"

He took his foot from the brake-pedal, and for ten seconds the released car shot down the slope unhindered. Then he checked the speed and answered her.

"A little while ago I should have said I didn't know; but now I do know.

It is because you love David Kent: you loved him before I had my chance."

She did not deny the princ.i.p.al fact, but she gave him his opportunity to set it aside if he could--and would.

"Call it foolish, romantic sentiment, if you like. Is there no way to shame me out of it?"

He shook his head slowly.

"You don't mean that."

"But if I say that I do; if I insist that I am willing to be shamed out of it."

His smile was that of a brother who remembers tardily to be loving-kind.

"I shall leave that task for some one who cares less for you and for your true happiness than I do, or ever shall. And it will be a mighty thankless service that that 'some one' will render you."

"But I ought to be whipped and sent to bed," she protested, almost tearfully. "Do you know what I have done?--how I have----"

She could not quite put it in words, even for him, and he helped her generously, as before.

"I know what Kent hasn't done; which is more to the point. But he will do it fast enough if you will give him half a chance."

"No," she said definitively.

"I say yes. One thing, and one thing only, has kept him from telling you any time since last autumn: that is a sort of finical loyalty to me. I saw how matters stood when he came aboard of our train at Gaston--I'm asking you to believe that I didn't know it beforeand I saw then that my only hope was to make a handfast friend of him. And I did it."

"I believe you can do anything you try to do," she said warmly.

This time his smile was a mere grimace.

"You will have to make one exception, after this; and so shall I. And since it is the first of any consequence in all my mounting years, it grinds. I can't throw another man out of the window and take his place."