“So you cannot progress for thought of me? Strange, when here in Gehenna I have out-progressed my penchant for you! Yet until to-day I did not realize how sleazy your form would look to me or how weak would sound your mawkings. One’s taste is best cultured by contrast.”
Her glance toward the King was eloquent interpretation.
“Don’t reproach me with my shamelessness, I beg of you,” she anticipated him. “It is a point of pride with me. Away, you weary me! Let this convince you that my fancy for you died with my body.”
She struck him with her jasper-like wand across the lips. At his low moan, the illusion of a red rose adorning its handle went out.
Dolores, realizing that the light of his love also must have been snuffed, scarcely could repress an echo of his protest against her cruelty. Lest she fail in the climax of her triumph, she turned from the sight of him; sank into the prime minister’s chair.
Her courage was reinforced when the dwarfs dragged Corporal Sam before the dais. The old soldier-soul’s shaken state from only a few hours of “special treatment” accented the necessity of his immediate release.
In the parting with her babe she felt free to indulge in more of naturalness. She had confessed a weakness there in the strength of her desire to overcome it. A moment she held the small shade in her arms. But the cling of little arms about her neck choked her with the necessity of untwining them. So trustful, so young, so blameless, to be consigned to punishment! The crush of desolation which pressed hard on her heart might best be lifted by thought of a possible day when she might see her child again—see her with her trust, her youth, her blamelessness eternalized.
The precious salvage she consigned to John with not a word of her heartful adjuration that he be good to her, take care of her, teach her that her mother had loved her, even as she had him, her best beloved, far too well to have and hold.
No more did she risk the aside which she wished with soldier Sam, in which to advise that he trust all his dread knowledge to John Cabot. She felt sure, however, that he would do so of his own accord. Once in the Fields, his object would be her own in sending him. Gallant himself, he soon would recognize gallantry and would give his confidence to John.
The King was issuing orders. An adequate guard was to serve as escort to the Elysian boundary, taking a wide detour to escape the shade patrol. The fact that such a transfer never before had been made need not concern them. The love-hound had blazed a trail from Elysium down. Let him blaze another from Gehenna up. They were to start at once.