"Whatever happens."
An instant later she was gone.
CHAPTER XV
THE ONLY WAY
As Echo stood once more in the dim light of her blue-and-white room, it seemed to her to belong to some blithe past life which she had lived long ago and discarded—as if she were suddenly an intruder into the peace and quiet it enfolded. For though her hands were like ice, her veins were beating hot and her mind was filled with the heat of a fiery furnace.
Cameron Craig held her father's name, his career, his whole happiness, and that of them all—her mother, Chilly, herself—in his hand. His was the power to crush and to ban. This man had professed to love her. She remembered what he had said to her that day in the garden—a year ago: "Since I met you the whole world has been changing for me.... You have entered into my blood and my brain, and the want of you has coloured all I have thought and done ... Echo, Echo!" The words seemed to wreathe about her, to return to her in pelted reverberations from the wall. She could save the situation. She could marry Cameron Craig.
The weird thought had rushed through her like a cold flame with the voicing of that name in the library. He would do it. More than the decision, more than any material ambition, he desired her. The letter—and the photographic plate—should be the price!
As she fought with herself through the long night hours, distraught yet tearless, it came to her with agonised reiteration that the resolve marked the end for her of all that makes life young. Up to a year ago she had been a girl; her deeper emotions had been unstirred, her soul unknown to herself. Only from the moment at the "Farm" when she had sent Harry Sevier from her to his battle with appetite, had she known the real meaning of life. Since then she had had the sweetness of learning love's unfolding in denial, and that very day it had come to fruition. Could it have been only that afternoon that the confession had trembled on his lips, when her heart had seemed to beat audibly, like little songs of joy? Now the cup was dashed from her lips. And he would never know—she could never tell him! That was the deep and piteous treason to which she must contribute!
She crept to the window and looked out over the garden, its elfish vapours dimly lighted by a thin, silver crescent-moon that seemed hanging like a gipsy ear-ring from a swarthy cloud. Below her the box-bordered paths showed in a sunken cross. The hemlock in its centre, with its triple spires, had been brought, a tiny seedling, by her great-great-grandmother from White Sulphur Springs, rooted in a gourd tied on the back of an old buff-coloured coach. The old lady's quaint portrait hung still in the dining-room, just above the diamond-leaded cabinet that held the tea-set of gold and lapiz lazuli blue, from which Jefferson and Randolph had drunk, and her garlanded silver basket whose inscription read, "From a lover of fifty years to his bride."