“Yes, Donald.” And she hid her face against him, a face that flushed hotly and excitedly.
He caught her close during a delicious moment, for the storm held a privacy that was almost impenetrable. Then, with a groan, he released her.
“Jean,” he said earnestly, “I can't do it. I would sell my soul to marry you to-night—yes, actually sell it to the devil; but, as a man who pretends to be honorable in his dealings, I can't. Oh, it simply kills me, this refusal; but the fact of it is that I love you too much to risk your future happiness.”
“Oh, boy, boy!” she cried pitifully. “What can be happiness for me but the having of you always? If you've done wrong, I want you. Whatever this awful thing is that is ruining our lives, I don't cafe. I only know one thing, and that is I want you!”
Had he known women as some men know them, Donald would have taken her tone and her passion as passports to heaven, and hunted up the fat and spectacled Mr. Gates then and there, and this story would have ended. But he did not. He was straightforward and unsophisticated in a manly way, and knew his duty; and he also knew it was not now that Jean might regret her step, but at that important point of life Pinero has so aptly named “mid-channel,” when the fire of youth has burned out, and the main concern is with the ashes remaining.
So, with the perfume of happiness in his nostrils, he put the temptation from him, and told Jean over and over that she must believe him to be acting for the best when he laid their lives out on such lines of misery. And she, after a while, believed, as he desired, and asked no more. Then, he told her that to know the things against him would make her still more unhappy, since they were not of his doing.
“You'll hear many things about me that are not true, and never could be,” Donald said at the last; “but don't believe them. For I have done nothing wrong. All I ask is your faith and trust in me. With them, I'll willingly go through the valley of the shadow, that in the end, some time, somewhere, we may be happy.”
“Those you shall have always,” was the reply; “and something else, too, whenever you want it.”
“What is that?”
“A wife.”