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“A wicked giant, seeking whom I may devour and carrying off lovely girls for dinner under pretence of marriage—-” He stopped his nonsense abruptly, having got so far, and both of them coloured. Thrashing about desperately for something to break the wretched silence, he seized on the one thing that in those days of his convalescence was always pertinent–food. “Speaking of dinner,” he said hastily, “isn’t it time for some buttermilk?”

She was quite calm when she came back–cool, even smiling; but Billy Grant had not had the safety valve of action. As she placed the glass on the table at his elbow he reached out and took her hand.

“Can you ever forgive me?” he asked. Not an original speech; the usual question of the marauding male, a query after the fact and too late for anything but forgiveness.

“Forgive you? For not dying?”

She was pale; but no more subterfuge now, no more turning aside from dangerous subjects. The matter was up before the house.

“For marrying you!” said Billy Grant, and upset the buttermilk. It took a little time to wipe up the floor and to put a clean cover on the stand, and after that to bring a fresh glass and place it on the table. But these were merely parliamentary preliminaries while each side got its forces in line.

“Do you hate me very much?” opened Billy Grant. This was, to change the figure, a blow below the belt.

“Why should I hate you?” countered the other side.

“I should think you would. I forced the thing on you.”

“I need not have done it.”

“But being you, and always thinking about making some one else happy and comfortable—-“

“Oh, if only they don’t find it out over there!” she burst out. “If they do and I have to leave, with Jim—-“

Here, realising that she was going to cry and not caring to screw up her face before any one, she put her arms on the stand and buried her face in them. Her stiff tulle cap almost touched Billy Grant’s arm.

Billy Grant had a shocked second.

“Jim?”

“My little brother,” from the table.

Billy Grant drew a long breath of relief. For a moment he had thought—-

“I wonder–whether I dare to say something to you.” Silence from the table and presumably consent. “Isn’t he–don’t you think that–I might be allowed to–to help Jim? It would help me to like myself again. Just now I’m not standing very high with myself.”

“Won’t you tell me why you did it?” she said, suddenly sitting up, her arms still out before her on the table. “Why did you coax so? You said it was because of a little property you had, but–that wasn’t it–was it?”

“No.”

“Or because you cared a snap for me.” This was affirmation, not question.

“No, not that, though I—-“

She gave a hopeless little gesture of despair.

“Then–why? Why?”

“For one of the meanest reasons I know–to be even with some people who had treated me badly.”

The thing was easier now. His flat denial of any sentimental reason had helped to make it so.

“A girl that you cared about?”

“Partly that. The girl was a poor thing. She didn’t care enough to be hurt by anything I did. But the people who made the trouble—-“

Now a curious thing happened. Billy Grant found at this moment that he no longer hated the Lindley Grants. The discovery left him speechless–that he who had taken his hate into the very valley of death with him should now find himself thinking of both Lindley and his wife with nothing more bitter than contempt shocked him. A state of affairs existed for which his hatred of the Lindley Grants was alone responsible; now the hate was gone and the state of affairs persisted.

“I should like,” said Billy Grant presently, “to tell you a little–if it will not bore you–about myself and the things I have done that I shouldn’t, and about the girl. And of course, you know, I’m–I’m not going to hold you to–to the thing I forced you into. There are ways to fix that.”