“But, if afterward,” he went on doggedly, “if afterward I should awake into another personality—don’t you see? Neither you nor I, dearest, can compromise with doubtful things. To us, life must be a thing clean beyond the possibility of blot.”
She still shook her head in stubborn negation.
“You gave yourself to me,” she said, “and I won’t let you go. You won’t wake up in another life. I won’t let you—and, if you do—” she paused, then added with a smile on her lips that seemed to settle matters for all time—“that is a bridge we will cross when we come to it—and we will cross it together.”
CHAPTER VIII
When he reached the cabin, Saxon found Steele still awake. The gray advance-light of dawn beyond the eastern ridges had grown rosy, and the rosiness had brightened into the blue of living day when an early teamster, passing along the turnpike, saw two men garbed in what he would have called “full-dress suits,” still sitting over their cigars on the verandah of the hill shack. A losing love either expels a man into the outer sourness of resentment, or graduates him into a friendship that needs no further testing. Steele was not the type that goes into an embittered exile. His face had become somewhat fixed as he listened, but there had been no surprise. He had known already, and, when the story was ended, he was an ally.
“There are two courses open to you,” he said, when he rose at last from his seat, “the plan you have of going to South America, and the one I suggested of facing forward and leaving the past behind. If you do the first, whether or not you are the man they want, the circumstantial case is strong. You know too little of your past to defend yourself, and you are placing yourself in the enemy’s hands. The result will probably be against you with equal certainty whether innocent or guilty.”
“Letting things lie,” demurred Saxon, “solves nothing.”
“Why solve them?” Steele paused at his door. “It would seem to me that with her in your life you would be safe against forgetting your present at all events—and that present is enough.”