“T. A.,” she said, and her voice had in it a marvelous quality, “I'm thirty-nine years old. You know I was married when I was eighteen and got my divorce after eight years. Those eight years would have left any woman who had endured them with one of two determinations: to take up life again and bring it out into the sunshine until it was sound, and sweet, and clean, and whole once more, or to hide the hurt and brood over it, and cover it with bitterness, and hate until it destroyed by its very foulness. I had Jock, and I chose the sun, thank God! I said then that marriage was a thing tried and abandoned forever, for me. And now—”
There was something almost fine in the lines of T. A. Buck's too feminine mouth and chin; but not fine enough.
“Now, Emma,” he repeated, “will you marry me?”
Emma McChesney's eyes were a wonderful thing to see, so full of pain were they, so wide with unshed tears.
“As long as—he—lived,” she went on, “the thought of marriage was repulsive to me. Then, that day seven months ago out in Iowa, when I picked up that paper and saw it staring out at me in print that seemed to waver and dance”—she covered her eyes with her hand for a moment—“'McChesney—Stuart McChesney, March 7, aged forty-seven years. Funeral to-day from Howland Brothers' chapel. Aberdeen and Edinburgh papers please copy!'”
{Illustration: “'Emma.' he said, 'will you marry me?'”}
T. A. Buck took the hand that covered her eyes and brought it gently down.
“Emma,” he said, “will you marry me?”
“T. A., I don't love you. Wait! Don't say it! I'm thirty-nine, but I'm brave and foolish enough to say that all these years of work, and disappointment, and struggle, and bitter experience haven't convinced me that love does not exist. People have said about me, seeing me in business, that I'm not a marrying woman. There is no such thing as that. Every woman is a marrying woman, and sometimes the light-heartedest, and the scoffingest, and the most self-sufficient of us are, beneath it all, the marryingest. Perhaps I'm making a mistake. Perhaps ten years from now I'll be ready to call myself a fool for having let slip what the wise ones would call a 'chance.' But I don't think so, T. A.”
“You know me too well,” argued T. A. Buck rather miserably. “But at least you know the worst of me as well as the best. You'd be taking no risks.”