“Yes?” She paused. “What is it, Jack dear? There’s something on your mind—are you afraid to tell me? Or aren’t you sure that you should?”
“I’m afraid,” said Ralston. “And so I’m going to do it,” he added a moment later. “Did you ever hear that I was what they call dissipated?”
“Is that it?” Katharine laughed, almost carelessly. “No, I never heard that said of you. People say you’re fast, and rather wild—and all that. I told you what I thought of that—I like it in you. Perhaps it isn’t right, exactly, to like a dash of naughtiness—is it?”
“I don’t know,” answered Ralston, evidently not comprehending the question, but intent upon his own thoughts. In the short pause which followed he did not change his position, but the veins swelled in his temples, and his eyelids drooped a little when he spoke again. “Katharine—I sometimes drink too much.”
Katharine trembled a little, but he did not see it. For some seconds she did not move, and did not take her eyes from him. Then she very slowly raised her hand and passed it over her brow, as though she were confused, and presently she bent forward, as he was bending, resting one elbow on her knee and looking earnestly into his face.
“Why do you do it, Jack? Don’t you love me?” She asked the two questions slowly and distinctly, but in the one there was all her pity—in the other all her love.
Again, as more than once lately, Ralston was almost irresistibly impelled to make a promise, simple and decisive, which should change his life, and which at all costs and risks he would keep. The impulse was stronger now, with Katharine’s eyes upon his, and her happiness on his soul, than it had been before. But the arguments for resisting it were also stronger. He was calm enough to know the magnitude of his temptations and his habitual weakness in resisting them. He said nothing.
“Why don’t you answer me, dear?” Katharine asked softly. “They were not hard questions, were they?”
“You know that I love you,” he answered—then hesitated, and then went on. “If I did not love you, I should not have told you. Do you believe that?”
He guessed that she only half realized and half understood all the meaning of what he had said. He had no thought of gaining credit in her opinion for having done what very few men would have risked in his position. The wish to speak had come from the heart, not from the head. But he had not foreseen that it must appear very easy to her for him to overcome a temptation which seemed insignificant in her eyes, compared with a life’s happiness.