He left the hearth and faced her with the length of the piano between them. "Could you love me?" he asked.
His voice set to vibrating nerves she had thought would never again respond to him. She trembled, and her eyes sank. "Even if I could—you couldn't love me. You could forgive—could be generous and kind. But you couldn't love."
"But I do love you," he said. And she, looking at him in wonder, thought there had never shone eyes so near to being the very soul itself. "I began to love you when you sent Gallatin away and faced me alone and did not lie. I came back because— You were like the air to me, Courtney. One isn't conscious of the air unless he hasn't it, and can't breathe. I've loved you more and more, day by day, ever since. And I shall love you more and more—need you more and more—every day until I die. Courtney—can't you forgive me? I am sorry for what I did—and—I love you."
She sank upon the piano seat, flung her slim white arms along the keyboard, buried her face in them. "I've found it!" she sobbed. "I've found it!"
Several discoveries in chemistry give Richard Vaughan fame, and Courtney shares it. But they value it all at nothing beside the discovery which gives them happiness: That the wise make of their mistakes a ladder, the foolish a grave.
THE END
* * * * * * * *
OTHER BOOKS BY
DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS
Mr. Phillips does not follow the usual fashion in novels. He has a fashion of his own. His readers are now numbered by the scores of thousands. In at least one of our cities, at the public library where they take ten copies of each of Mr. Phillips's new books, there is usually a waiting-list five to seven months long for a chance at it, which shows one of two things, or perhaps both: to how much trouble some people will go to save the trifling expenditure of the price of a book, or how extremely popular Mr. Phillips is—so popular that he has a multitude of eager readers among those who cannot afford to buy books.