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"Five fingers!" she repeated, "and I am twenty-eight. The percentage is pretty low, you know."

"Perhaps you and I ask too much?"

He was conscious of her quick, searching glance.

"Oh! You feel that way, too? I mean - as I do, that it's all hardly worth while? But you seem to have everything, Clay."

"You have one thing I lack. Youth."

"Youth! At twenty-eight!"

"You can still mold your life, Audrey dear. You have had a bad time, but - with all reverence to Chris's memory - his going out of it, under the circumstances, is a grief. But it doesn't spell shipwreck."

"Do you mean that I will marry again?" she asked, in a low tone.

"Don't you think you will, some time? Some nice young chap who will worship you all the days of his life? That - well, that is what I expect for you. It's at least possible, you know."

"Is it what you want for me?"

"Good God!" he burst out, his restraint suddenly gone. "What do you want me to say? What can I say, except that I want you to be happy? Don't you think I've gone over it all, over and over again? I'd give my life for the right to tell you the things I think, but - I haven't that right. Even this little time together is wrong, the way things are. It is all wrong."

"I'm sorry, Clay. I know. I am just reckless to-day. You know I am reckless. It's my vice. But sometimes - we'd better talk about the mill."

But he could not talk about the mill just then. They walked along in silence, and after a little he felt her touch his arm.

"Wouldn't it be better just to have it out?" she asked, wistfully. "That wouldn't hurt anybody, would it?"

"I'm afraid, Audrey."

"I'm not," she said proudly. "I sometimes think - oh, I think such a lot these days - that if we talked these things over, I'd recover my - friend. I've lost him now, you see. And I'm so horribly lonely, Clay."

"Lost him!"

"Lost him," she repeated. "I've lost my friend, and I haven't gained anything. It didn't hurt anybody for us to meet now and then, Clay. You know that. I wish you would understand," she added impatiently. "I only want to go back to things as they were. I want you to come in now and then. We used to talk about all sorts of things, and I miss that. Plenty of people come, but that's different. It's only your occasional companionship I want. I don't want you to come and make love to me."

"You say you have missed the companionship," he said rather unsteadily. "I wonder if you think I haven't?"

"I know you have, my dear. And that is why I want you to come. To come without being afraid that I expect or want anything else. Surely we can manage that."

He smiled down at her, rather wryly, at her straight courageous figure, her brave eyes, meeting his so directly. How like her it all was, the straightforwardness of it, the absence of coquetry. And once again he knew, not only that he loved her with all the depths of him, of his strong body and his vigorous mind, but that she was his woman. The one woman in the world for him. It was as though all his life he had been searching for her, and he had found her, and it was too late. She knew it, too. It was in her very eyes.

"I have wanted to come, terribly," he said finally. And when she held out her hand to him, he bent down and kissed it.

"Then that's settled," she said, in a matter-of-fact tone. "And now I'll tell you about Clare. I'm rather proud of her."

"Clare?"

The tension had been so great that he had forgotten the blonde girl entirely.

"Do you remember the night I got a hundred dollars from you? And later on, that I asked you for work in your mill for the girl I got it for?"

"Do you mean?" He looked at her in surprise.

"That was the girl. You see, she rather holds onto me. It's awful in a way, too. It looks as though I am posing as magnanimous. I'm not, Clay. If I had cared awfully it would have been different. But then, if I had cared awfully, perhaps it would never have happened."

"You have nothing to blame yourself for, Audrey."

"Well, I do, rather. But that's not the point. Sometimes when I am alone I have wicked thoughts, you know,