"Damn the invitations and the wedding guests," he exclaimed. "We weren't getting married for their benefit. Leave that to me. The papers will announce that I've got to go to Europe—and that because of a turn in your mother's condition you've decided to defer the wedding until I come back. That's all they need to know."
He turned to the window and after a minute wheeled suddenly back.
"I have one thing still to ask. I have no longer any claim, of course. But until three months have passed—you won't send for Boone Wellver, will you?"
The girl's head came up with a tilted chin.
"I shall never send for him," she vehemently declared. "He's done with me and that's all there is to it!"
It was not undiluted fiction which Morgan gave to the morning papers that night, as he regretfully reported the sudden heart attack of Mrs. Masters, which necessitated an eleventh hour postponement of his wedding. There had been a heart attack which might have been averted had the good lady been able to receive his tidings with a less flurried spirit, but that he did not regard it necessary to explain, and a flinty something in his eye discouraged unnecessary questions.
So Morgan set out alone on the trip which was to have been a honeymoon, and the lady whose dreams of a rehabilitated place in society had been dashed afforded her daughter a fulness of anxiety by hanging precariously between life and death.
It is doubtful whether those circles in which Anne and Morgan moved were wholly beguiled, and it is certain that sympathy followed the traveller.
"The engagement will never be renewed," mused an elderly lady who had been fond of Anne from childhood. "She won't take up again with her wild man of the mountains either, you may rest assured of that."
"But why?" challenged the gentleman to whom these sage observations were addressed. "Presumably a persistent interest in young Wellver caused this break with—"