"I don't know why I put it like that," he said. "Please don't think ...

I can't bear to have you think that I came down here to--ask anything of you--anything in the way of a reward for having seen what is so plain to every one. I haven't any--claim at all. I want to earn your friendship.

It's the biggest thing I've got to hope for. But I've no idea that you can hand it out to me ready-made. I believe you'd do it if you could.

But you said once, yourself, that it wasn't a thing that could be given.

It was a thing that had to be earned. And you were right about that, as you were about so many other things. Well, I'm going to try to earn it."

"Is that--all you want?" she asked, and then hearing the little gasp he gave, she swung round quickly and looked at him. It was pretty dark in the room, but his face in the dusk seemed to have whitened.

"Is friendship all you want of me, Roddy?" she asked again.

She stood there waiting, a full minute, in silence. Then she said, "You don't have to tell me that. Because I know. Oh--oh, my dear, how well I know!"

He didn't come to her; just stood there, gripping the corner of her bookcase and staring at her silhouette, which was about all he could see of her against the window. At last he said, in a strained dry voice she'd hardly have known for his:

"If you know that--if I've let you see that, then I've done just about the last despicable thing there was left for me to do. I've come down here and--made you feel sorry for me. So that with that--divine--kindliness of yours, you're willing to give me--everything."

He straightened up and came a step nearer. "Well, I won't have it, I tell you! I don't know how you guessed. If I'd dreamed I was betraying that to you ...! Don't I know--it's burnt into me so that I'll never forget--what the memory of my love must be to you--the memory of the hideous things it's done to you. And now, after all that--after you've won your fight--alone--and stand where you stand now--for me to come begging! And take a gift like that! I tell you it _is_ pity. It can't be anything else."

There was another minute of silence, and then he heard her make a little noise in her throat, a noise that would have been a sob had there not been something like a laugh in it. The next moment she said, "Come over here, Roddy," and as he hesitated, as if he hadn't understood, she added, "I want you to look at me. Over here by the window, where there's light enough to see me by."

He came wonderingly, very slowly, but at last, with her outstretched hand she reached him and drew him around between her and the window.

"Look into my face," she commanded. "Look into my eyes; as far in as you can. Is it--oh, my dearest"--the sob of pure joy came again--"is it pity that you see?"

She'd had her hands upon his shoulders, but now they clasped themselves behind his head. Her vision of him had swum away in a blur, and without the support she got from him she'd have been swaying giddily.

"Roddy, old man," she said, "if I hadn't seen--in the first--ten minutes, the thing you--meant so hard I shouldn't see--I think it would have--killed me. If I hadn't seen that you loved me--after all; after everything. After all the tortures you'd suffered, through me. Because that's all I want--in the world."

At that he put his arms around her and pulled her up to him. But the manner of it was so different from his old embraces that presently she drew him around so that what little light there was fell on his face, and searched it thoughtfully.

"You _do_ believe me, Roddy, don't you--that there isn't any pity about it? There isn't any room for pity. There's nothing in me at all but just a great big--want of you. Don't you understand that?"

He did understand it with his mind, but he was a little dazed, like one who has stood too near where the lightning struck. The hope he had kept buried alive so long--buried alive because it wouldn't die--could not be brought out into a blinding glory like this without shrinking--pain--exquisite terrifying pain.

The knowledge she had acquired by her own suffering stood her in good stead now. She did not mistake, as the Rose he had married might have done, the weakness of his response for coldness--indifference.

She went back and began making love to him more gently; released herself from his arms, led him over to her one big chair, and made him sit down in it, settled herself upon the arm of it and contented herself with one of his hands. Presently he took one of hers, bent his face down over it and brushed the back of it with his lips.

The timidity of that caress, with all it revealed to her, was too much for her. She swallowed one sob, and another, but the next one got away from her and she broke out in a passionate fit of weeping.

That roused him from his daze a little, and he pulled her down in his arms--held her tight--comforted her.

When she got herself in hand again, she got up, went away to wash her face, and coming back in the room again, lighted a reading-lamp and drew down the blinds.

"Rose," he said presently, "what are we going to do?"

She knew she was not answering the true intent of his question when she said:

"Well, for one thing we can get a little supper. I don't know what we've got to eat, but we won't care--to-night."

There was a ring of decision in his voice that startled her a little when he said:

"No, we won't do that to-night. We'll go out somewhere to a restaurant."

Their eyes met--unwavering.

"Yes," she said, "that's what we'll do."

They didn't talk much across the table in the deserted little Italian restaurant they went to. Neither of them afterward could remember anything they'd said. They ate their meal in a sort of grave contented happiness that was reaching down deeper and deeper into them every minute, and they walked back to the gray brick building in Thirteenth Street, arm in arm, hand in hand, in silence. But when she stopped there, he said:

"Let's walk a little farther, Rose. There are things we've got to decide, and--and I'm not going in with you again to-night."

She caught her breath at that, and her hand tightened its hold on his.

But she walked on with him.

He said, presently, "You understand, don't you?"

She answered, "Oh, my dear!--yes." But she added, a little shakily, "I wish we had a magic-carpet right here, that we could fly home on."

Then they walked a while in silence.

At last he said: "There's this we can do. I can go back to my hotel to-night, and tell them that I'm expecting you--that I'm expecting my wife to join me there. To-morrow? And then I can come and get you and bring you there. It's not home, and it's not the place I'd choose for--for a honeymoon, but ..."

The way she echoed the word set him thinking. But before his thoughts had got to their destination she said:

"Shall we make it a real honeymoon, Roddy--make it as complete as we can? Forget everything and let all the world be ..."

He supplied a word for her, "Rose-color?"

She accepted it with a caressing little laugh, "... for a while?"

"That's what I was fumbling for," he said, "but I can't think very straight to-night. I've got it now, though. That cottage we had--before the twins were born--down on the Cape. There won't be a soul there this time of the year. We'd have the world to ourselves."

"Yes," she said, "for a little while, we'd want it like that. But after a while--after a day or two, could we have the babies? Could the nurse bring them on to me and then go straight back, so that I could have them--and you, altogether?"

He said, "You darling!" But he couldn't manage more than that.

A little later he suggested that they could get the place by telegraph and could set out for it to-morrow.

She laughed and asked, "Will you let me be as silly as I like for once?

Will you give me a week--well, till Saturday; that would do--to get ready in?"

"Get ready?" he echoed.

"Clothes and thinks," she said. "A--trousseau, don't you see? I've been so busy making clothes for other people that I've got just about nothing myself. And I'd like ... But I don't really care, Roddy. I'll go with you to-morrow, 'as is,' if you want me to."

"No," he said. "We'll do it the other way."

And then he took her back to the gray brick entrance and, just out of range of the elevator man, kissed her good night.