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 nounced. "WELL, WHY NOT?" She fairly hurled the three-word bridge across the sudden, awful chasm of silence that yawned before her.

Drew's addled mind caught the phrase dully and turned it over and over without attempting to cross on it. "Well, why not? Well, why not?" he kept repeating. His discomfiture filled the girl with hysterical delight, and she came and perched herself opposite him on the farther end of his desk and smiled at him.

"It seems to me perfectly simple," she argued. "Without any doubt or question you certainly are the kind of man whom I should like to marry. You are true and loyal and generous and rugged about things. And you like the things that I like. And I like the people that you like. And, most of anything in the world, you are clever in the affec tions. You are heart-wise as well as head-wise. Why, even in the very littlest, silliest thing that could possibly matter, you would n't for instance remember George Washington's birthday and forget mine. And you would n't go away on a lark and leave me if I was sick, any more than you d blow out the gas. And you would n't hurt me about other women any more than you d eat with your knife." Impulsively she reached over and patted his hand with the tips of