“Yes. I think we are.” He spoke quietly, as though from a long and familiar conviction.
A short silence followed, and they walked along side by side in the soft evening air, so close that their elbows touched, as they kept step together—a mode of courtship not usually practised by their kind, and which they would have been ashamed of in a more frequented quarter of the city. They would probably have noticed it unfavourably in another couple, and would have set the pair down as a dry-goods clerk and a shopgirl. But when the ‘stiff and proud’ Four Hundred are very much in love, and when they are quite sure that none of the remaining Three Hundred and Ninety-eight are looking, they behave precisely like human beings, which is really to their credit, though they would be so much ashamed to have it generally known.
“But then, we’re married, you know,” said Katharine, as though she had solved a difficult problem.
Ralston glanced at the face he loved and smiled happily.
“There’s a good deal besides that,” he said. “There are a great many things that tie us together. You’ve made a man of me. That’s one thing. But for you, I don’t know where I should have been now—in a bad way, I fancy.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” protested Katharine. “A man who can do the things you’ve done doesn’t come to grief.”
“It isn’t anything I’ve done,” Ralston answered. “It’s what you’ve made me feel. If I’ve done anything at all, it’s been for your sake. You know that as well as I do. And if there were big things to be done, it would be the same.”
“You’ve done the biggest thing that any man can do. You don’t need to have me tell you that.”
“Oh—about reforming my ways, you mean?” He affected to laugh. “That wasn’t anything. You made it nice and easy.”
“Especially when I didn’t believe in you, and treated you like a brute,” said Katharine, with an expression of pain at the recollection. “Don’t talk about it, Jack. I’ve never forgiven myself—I never shall.”