"I didn't have to go to sea," he said, snatching at this crumb of
hope. "There are other jobs than ships. Why, only last trip I was
offered a refrigerating plant in Chicago!"

He did not tell her it bore a salary of four hundred dollars a
month and that he had meant to lay it at her feet that morning. In
the light of her millions that sum, so considerable an hour
before, had suddenly shrunk to nothing. How puny and pitiful it
seemed in the contrast. He had a sense that everything had shrunk
to nothing--his life, his hopes, his future.

"I know you think I am cruel," she said, in the same calm,
considerate tone she had used throughout. "But I never gave you
any encouragement, Frank--not in the way you wanted or expected.
You were the only person I knew who was the least bit cultivated
and nice and travelled and out of the commonplace. I can't tell
you how much you brightened my life here, or how glad I was when
you came or how sorry I was when you went away--but it wasn't
love, Frank--not the love you wished for or the love I feel I have
the power to give."

"Why did you let me go on then?" he broke out, "I getting deeper
and deeper into it and you knowing all the time it never could
come to anything? Just because no words were said, did that make
you blind? If you were such a friend of mine as you said you were,
wouldn't it have been kinder to have shown me the door and tell me
straight out it was hopeless and impossible? Oh, Florence, you
took my love when you wanted it, like a person getting warm at a
fire, and now when you don't need it any longer you tell me quite
unconcernedly that it is all over between us!"