"When you like, only leave me now. Please go away. You won't think I'm rude, will you? But I'm not—not as I generally am—"
"Good-bye." He put out his, hand frankly, and smiled so humbly, and yet withal so confidently, that she felt as if in spite of herself she might yield to his persistence through sheer weariness.
To her surprise, the next few weeks passed without incident bringing no development in the situation. She saw little of Evie and almost nothing of Ford. One or two encounters with Charles Conquest had no result beyond the reiteration on his part of a set phrase, "You're coming to it, Miriam," which, while exasperating her nerves, had a kind of hypnotic effect upon her will. She felt as if she might be "coming to it." Without calculating the probabilities she saw clearly enough that if she married Conquest the very act would furnish proof to Ford that her intervention in his affairs had been without self-interest. It would even offer some proof to herself, the sort of proof that strengthens the resolution and supports what is tottering in the pride. Notwithstanding the valor with which she struggled her victory over herself was not so complete that she could contemplate the destruction of Ford's happiness with absolute confidence in the purity of her motives in bringing it to ruin. It was difficult to take the highest road when what was left of her own fiercest instincts accompanied her on it. That she had fierce instincts she was quite aware. It was not for nothing that she had been born almost beyond the confines of the civilized earth, of parents for whom law and order and other men's rights were as the dead letter. True, she was trying to train the inheritance received from them to its finer purposes, as the vine draws strange essences from a flinty soil and sublimates them into the grape—but it was still their inheritance. While she was proud of it, she was afraid of it; and the fact that it leaped with her to separate Norrie Ford from Evie Colfax was a reason for distrusting the very impulse she knew to be right. Marriage with Conquest presented itself, therefore as a refuge—from Ford's suspicion and her own.
For the time being, however, the necessity for doing anything was not pressing. Evie was caught into the social machine that had been set going on her account, and was not so much whirling in it as being whirled. Her energies were so taxed by the task of going round that she had only snatches of time and attention to give to her own future. In one of these she wrote to her uncle Jarrott, asking his consent to the immediate proclamation of her engagement, with his approval of her marriage at the end of the winter, though the reasons she gave him were not the same as those she advanced to Miriam. To him she dwelt on the maturity of her age—twenty by this time—the unchanging nature of her sentiments, and her desire to be settled down. To Miriam she was content to say, "There's something! and I sha'n't get to the bottom of it till we're married."
Of the opening thus unexpectedly offered her Miriam made full use, pointing out the folly or verifying suspicions after marriage rather than before.
"Well, I'm going to do it, do you see?" was Evie's only reply. "I know it will be all right in the end."
Still a few weeks were to pass, and it was early in the new year before Uncle Jarrott's cablegram arrived with the three words, "If you like." Miriam received the information at the opera, where she had been suddenly called on to take the place of Miss Jarrott, laid low with "one of her headaches." It was Ford who told her, during an entr'acte, when for a few minutes Evie had left the box with the young man who made the fourth in the party. Finding themselves alone, Ford and Miriam withdrew as far as possible from public observation, speaking in rapid undertones.
"But you'll not let her do it?" Miriam urged.
"I shall, if you will. You can stop it—or posptone it. If you don't, I have every right to forge ahead. It's no use going over the old arguments again—"