“If she will not come?”
He turned upon her then, a sudden grim smile lighting his face. “I know what I shall do then,” he said. “But you will think it is madness. If she refuses to come, I shall make the necessary arrangements, and kidnap her. She’s got to come.”
Eveley burst into quick laughter at the picture that came to her—a picture of the old-time, immaculate Lem of the ballrooms, carrying his wife away into the mountains to live a cave-man life.
He laughed with her, but the dead-set of his face remained. “It sounds like a joke,” he admitted. “But I have made up my mind. Miriam is mine, and I am going to have her. We’ll just go up into the mountains for a few months, and she will see that I am cured.”
Mile after mile they drove in silence up the steep mountain grades, and after a long time he drew the car off beside the road under a cluster of trees.
“That is the ranch, but I will not drive in. If she saw us coming she would not talk to us, so you must catch her unawares. I shall wait here for you. You’d better not tell her I am going to kidnap her, I think I would rather take her by surprise. She has to come, Eve, now make her see it. Just a servant that is all I want to be to her for a while. But she did love me, and she will again.”
So Eveley walked swiftly up the drive to the house, keeping in the shadow as much as possible, surprised to know that after all the years of her disgust for the husband of her friend, her sympathies now were all with him.
At the kitchen door she assumed her most winsome and disarming smile and asked for Mrs. Landis.
“She does not wish to see any one,” said the woman quickly. “She said particularly that she would not see any callers.”
“But she will see me, I am sure,” said Eveley coaxingly. “You ask her. Tell her it is Eveley Ainsworth. She always sees me.”