Diana gave a little joyous shriek, but my cry of despair mingled with it. I pushed back the screen so that it tottered and fell with a crash, as I flew out in time to seize Eagle's hand with the paper in it.
"No!" I gasped. "Don't let me have lived for nothing, Eagle! I would gladly have given my life to get this bit of paper for you. I shall die of grief if I'm not to help you after all."
Holding the written message firmly in one hand, he laid the other over mine.
"You heard all I said?" he asked. "I am glad. I meant you to hear it in your sister's presence. Yet, though you heard, you speak of not helping me, Peggy? What she said isn't true, then? It isn't true that you love me?"
"It is true, and you know it only too well," I answered, hardly remembering that Diana listened, hanging anxiously on every word as on a verdict for life or death. "I worship you, Eagle; and that's why I don't care to live if you are not saved. The great chance has come, when we least expected it, and if you don't take it now it's in your hand——"
"It seems to me that my way of taking the great chance is after all the only way, if we are to be happy. Peggy, I find that I love you too much to take any other way. Can you love me as I am, love me enough to say: 'Do what is right for you?'"
"It is right for you to have justice!" I pleaded with him.
"I would rather have love."
"You can have both!"
"No. It doesn't seem so to me."