“If you will.”
“What is his name? I know of his accident and the circumstances.”
She hesitated for an instant, then said, “He is called Draper—a trapper and woodsman.”
“But I was going away to-morrow at sunrise. All my arrangements are made,” he urged, his eyes holding hers, his passion swimming in his eyes again.
“But you will not see a man die, if you can save him?” she pleaded, unable now to meet his look, its mastery and its depth.
Her heart had almost leaped with joy at the suggestion that he could not stay; but as suddenly self-reproach and shame filled her mind, and she had challenged him so. But yet, what right had she to sacrifice this man she loved to the perverted criminal who had spoiled her youth and taken away from her every dear illusion of her life and heart? By every right of justice and humanity she was no more the wife of Henry Meydon than if she had never seen him. He had forfeited every claim upon her, dragged in the mire her unspotted life—unspotted, for in all temptation, in her defenceless position, she had kept the whole commandment; she had, while at the mercy of her own temperament, fought her way through all, with a weeping heart and laughing lips. Had she not longed for a little home with a great love, and a strong, true man? Ah, it had been lonely, bitterly lonely! Yet she had remained true to the scoundrel, from whom she could not free herself without putting him in the grasp of the law to atone for his crime. She was punished for his crimes; she was denied the exercise of her womanhood in order to shield him. Still she remembered that once she had loved him, those years ago, when he first won her heart from those so much better than he, who loved her so much more honestly; and this memory had helped her in a way. She had tried to be true to it, that dead, lost thing, of which this man who came once a year to see her, and now, lying with his life at stake in the hospital, was the repellent ghost.
“Ah, you will not see him die?” she urged.
“It seems to move you greatly what happens to this man,” he said, his determined dark eyes searching hers, for she baffled him. If she could feel so much for a “casual,” why not a little more feeling for him? Suddenly, as he drew her eyes to him again, there came the conviction that they were full of feeling for him. They were sending a message, an appealing, passionate message, which told him more than he had ever heard from her or seen in her face before. Yes, she was his! Without a spoken word she had told him so. What, then, held her back? But women were a race by themselves, and he knew that he must wait till she chose to have him know what she had unintentionally conveyed but now.
“Yes, I am moved,” she continued slowly. “Who can tell what this man might do with his life, if it is saved! Don’t you think of that? It isn’t the importance of a life that’s at stake; it’s the importance of living; and we do not live alone, do we?”
His mind was made up. “I will not, cannot promise anything till I have seen him. But I will go and see him, and I’ll send you word later what I can do, or not do. Will that satisfy you? If I cannot do it, I will come to say good-by.”