He caught up her hesitation like a flash.
"Fake the lines, Helena, if you haven't had enough rehearsals," he suggested ironically. "Anything goes—with me."
And now a tinge of color came to Helena's cheeks, and the brown eyes raised, and flashed, and dropped.
"He went to try and find help," she said. "He was out all night in the storm. I do not know how far he must have walked. I know the nearest house was five or six miles away—and there was no horse there—the man had driven to some town that morning. It was almost daylight before Mr. Thornton at last came back with a team. We were forty miles from here—we sent the team to the nearest town for gasoline and then motored back." She stopped—and then, with a catch in her voice: "He—he was very good to me."
"Good to me"—the words seemed to stab at Madison, seemed to ring in his ears and goad him with a fiercer jealousy—and her story of the night, what she had been saying, save those words, was as nothing, meant nothing, was swept from his consciousness—and only she, standing there before him, glorious, maddening in her beauty, remained. Soul, mind and body leaped into fiery passion—she was his, and his she always would be—those eyes, those lips, the white throat, those perfect arms to cling about his neck—and all of heaven and hell and earth were naught beside her.
"I love you!"—his face was white, his words fierce-breathed, almost incoherent—and he leaned toward her with a sudden, uncontrollable movement, his arms sweeping out to clasp her.
"I love you, Helena—I love you. Do you understand—it's you! You—I love you!"
"You love me!"—she retreated from him, but her head was raised now, and her voice rang with a bitterness cold as the touch of death. "Love! What do you know of love! We talk plain, you say. Love—love for me! Passion, vice, lust, sin—and, oh, my God, degradation and misery and shame—love! Love! That is your love!"
He stood for a moment and stared at her again—and her face was as pallid ivory. And something seemed to daze him, and he brushed his hand across his eyes—the logic was faulty, torn and pitiful, and he groped after the flaw.
"It's—it's your love as well as mine," he said in a stumbling way—then his brain flashed quick into action. "My love—what other love have you known but that?" he cried. "It's our love—the love we have known together—and we're going back to it—see? I've had enough of this. You pack your trunks—and pack them quick! We're going to beat it out of here! We're going back to our—love. We're going back where I don't have to sit around like a puling fool and watch Thornton chuck you under the chin—we're going where he'll want a tombstone if he ever shows his face there. You thought the game would hold me to the last jackpot—did you? Well, I've got enough—and there's no game big enough to make me stand for this. That looks like love—doesn't it?" He burst again into a