"Say you love me, darling," he commanded, wishing, like all lovers, to hear the spoken words.
Katherine Bush was very pale, and there was concentrated feeling in her face which startled him. Then she answered, her voice deeper than usual:
"Yes—I love you, Algy—perhaps you will never know how much. I do not suppose I will ever really love anyone else in the same way in my life."
Then the train drew up at the station.
The people all looked unreal in the foggy October air under the glaring lights—and the whole thing appeared as a dream indeed when, half an hour later, Katherine sped through the suburban roads to Bindon's Green, alone in the taxi. Lord Algy had put her in and paid the man liberally, and with many last love words had bidden her good-night and—au revoir!
So this chapter was finished—she realised that. And it had been really worth while. An outlook had opened for her into a whole new world—where realities lived—where new beings moved, where new standpoints could be reached. She saw that her former life had been swept from her—and now, to look back upon, appeared an impossible tedium. She had mastered all the shades of what three days of most intimate companionship with a gentleman could mean, and the memory contained no flaw. Algy's chivalry and courtesy had never faltered; she might have been a princess or his bride, from the homage he had paid her. Dear, much-loved Algy! Her passion for him was tinged with almost a mother love—there was something so tender and open-hearted about him. But now she must take stern hold of herself, and must have pluck enough to profit by what she had learned of life—Though to-night she was too tired to do more than retrospect.
Oh! the wonder of it all!—the wonder of love, and the wonder of emotion! She clenched her cold hands round the handle of her little valise. She was trembling. She had insisted upon his keeping the fur-lined coat for the present. How could she account for it to her family, she had argued? But she never meant to take it again.
No one was awake at Laburnum Villa when she opened the door with her latchkey, and she crept up to her little icy chamber under the roof, numb in mind and body and soul—and was soon shivering between the cotton sheets.
Oh! the contrast to the warm, flower-scented bedroom at the Palatial! And once she had not known the difference between linen and cotton!
She said this over to herself while she felt the nap—and then the tears gathered in her eyes one by one, and she sobbed uncontrollably for a while—Alas! to have to renounce all joy—forever more!