"It isn't anything you can do—in the rest of your life, my poor boy! It is what you have done—in the first of it!... Oh, Morton! It isn't right to let us grow up without knowing! You never would have done it if you'd known—would you? Can't you—can't we—do something to—stop this awfulness?"
Her tender heart suffered in the pain she was inflicting, suffered too in her own loss; for as she faced the thought of final separation she found that her grief ran back into the far-off years of childhood. But she had made up her mind with a finality only the more absolute because it hurt her. Even what he said of possible recovery did not move her—the very thought of marriage had become impossible.
"I shall never marry," she added, with a shiver; thinking that he might derive some comfort from the thought; but he replied with a bitter derisive little laugh. He did not rise to her appeal to "help the others." So far in life the happiness of Morton Elder had been his one engrossing care; and now the unhappiness of Morton Elder assumed even larger proportions.
That bright and hallowed future to which he had been looking forward so earnestly had been suddenly withdrawn from him; his good resolutions, his "living straight" for the present, were wasted.
"You women that are so superior," he said, "that'll turn a man down for things that are over and done with—that he's sorry for and ashamed of—do you know what you drive a man to! What do you think's going to become of me if you throw me over!"
He reached out his hands to her in real agony. "Vivian! I love you! I can't live without you! I can't be good without you! And you love me a little—don't you?"
She did. She could not deny it. She loved to shut her eyes to the future, to forgive the past, to come to those outstretched arms and bury everything beneath that one overwhelming phrase—"I love you!"
But she heard again Dr. Bellair's clear low accusing voice—"Will you tell that to your crippled children?"
She rose to her feet. "I cannot help it, Morton. I am sorry—you will not believe how sorry I am! But I will never marry you."