"He mightn't have asked me, if you hadn't been here to blunder into the affair," said I, composedly. "Let us drop the subject, please. I shall never marry The Author." It gave me a sense of relief and freedom to hear myself say that. "I can't marry The Author."
He went pale. "Sophy--you can't marry me, either," he said.
"Of course not." I wondered at myself for being so calm and collected. "I knew that all along. You care for another woman. You told me so, you know."
"I told you no such thing," he said. "I told you I cared for a woman, but that there was another man. Now I've just been told she has no idea of accepting the other man. In spite of all he has to offer, she isn't going to marry him." His face was at once ecstatic and tortured. "_Why_ won't you marry the other man, Sophy?"
"Because of a dream I dreamed, when I was sick," I said noncommittally.
"Ah! And did you dream that somebody called you--and held you--and wouldn't let you go?"
"No need, Sophy. It was to me you came back." Of a sudden his head drooped. "And now I can't marry you!"
Nicholas Jelnik a beggar couldn't find lodgment in my brain. I could only stare at him incredulously.
"I learned some time ago that things were not altogether right over yonder, but I hadn't the ghost of an idea that my entire estate was involved; that while I'd been 'tramping'--I'll use Judge Gatchell's word--the men in whose hands I placed too much power had taken advantage of it. A very common, every-day story, you see.
"Remains the fact that I'm stripped to the bone. The estate's wiped out. And," he added, with a grave smile, "I haven't even discovered the mythical Hynds jewels. Now you see, Sophy, why I can't marry you."
He flushed to the roots of his black hair. Hynds-Jelnik pride rose in arms.
"I should cut rather a sorry figure marrying the owner of Hynds House, in the present circumstances," he said curtly. "You will remember that The Author called me an adventurer! I have told you I have nothing."
"No. But I neglected that, too, Sophy. The _Wanderlust_ had me in its grip."
"I shall leave here, put in some months of hard study, and then fight my way upward. My father was the greatest alienist of his generation, and I was trained under his eye. But in the meantime--"