“Well, I guess I do, too,” he admitted grudgingly. “I must talk plainly to you this once, Jean, if I never do again. The woman is—oh, well, we’ll say she is pretty nearly everything she ought not to be; and Philip thinks and says that he can go no lower than he has already gone. What he said to me when I wrestled with him was this: ‘I’m merely trying to give another human being, to whose plane I have sunk myself, a chance for the only redemption that can ever come to her—in this life.’ And I’ll do him this much justice: he didn’t know—because I couldn’t tell him—how much it was going to hurt you.”
A cool breeze swept across the plain from the mountain rampart in the west, and the yellow leaves of the cottonwoods sifted down upon them in a golden shower. Over in the Clear Creek valley a freight train inched its way along toward Denver like a monstrous caterpillar. In the transparent atmosphere of the perfect autumn day Long’s Peak stood out as clearly as if its vast bulk rose from just behind the nearest swelling of the foot-hills. When the silence grew over-long, the play-boy spoke again.
“Philip didn’t know—doesn’t know; but I have known all along. You love him, Jean. It is nothing to be ashamed of,” he hastened to add. “It is just something to be sorry for, now. I know well enough you can never give another man what you have given him ... but I want the right to stand by you—to comfort you. I’m asking you to marry me, Jean, dear.”
The shock of a fear realized had gone out of her eyes when she turned to him, and in its place there was something almost like adoration.
“You’d make sacrifices, too, wouldn’t you?” she said, very gently. Then: “Are you forgetting Miss Follansbee?”
“Oh, no; Eugie is going to marry Stephen Drew. I meant to have told you. It is to be next month, I believe.”
Another speechless moment while a second shower of the yellow leaves came circling down. Then she spoke again, still more gently.
“I think you are one of God’s gentlemen, Harry; I shall always think so. But there are two good reasons why we can’t marry. One is——”
“I know what you are going to say,” he interrupted: “that I don’t love you at all—in a marrying way; that I am only sorry for you. But let that go. Suppose there isn’t any marrying love on either side. You remember what you said the evening when I told you about Eugie; that people might marry and be a comfort to each other without that kind of love. Besides, when you come right down to it, what is marrying love, anyway?”
She got up and shook the fallen leaves from her lap.