"The one thing I cannot understand, Ranny," she observed, "is your unreasonable skepticism."
"You feel you could trust such a man implicitly?" I demanded.
"Yes," was the firm reply. "If there is any one thing clear, it is that Jim Pendleton is genuinely penitent. Suppose that lost-memory story is all moonshine, as you and Dibdin seem to think. By coming back that way doesn't the man really display more character than if it were true? He really shows that if he's gone wrong he has the stamina to come right again—and that's a good deal in this wicked world, Ranny."
"I had not looked at it in that light," I muttered, disturbed.
"I know you haven't," she gave a triumphant laugh. "You couldn't be calm on the subject. You really are an emotional, high-strung romantic, Ranny, and I don't altogether blame you for being prejudiced. But any dispassionate person knowing the facts will tell you I am right."
"It would be difficult for me to feel dispassionate on the subject," I returned doggedly.
"Certainly it would," was her ready reply. "That's why I am glad I captured you. Some friend had to show you your own interest."
"My interest?"
"Ranny," she cried in a voice charged with purpose if not with emotion,—with an intense, a vibrating resolution that impinged like a heavy weight upon my senses. "Ranny—don't let's be children—we are too old for that. Let bygones be bygones. I'll humiliate myself before you. I—I love you, Ranny—" and her lips really quivered—"I have always loved you—will you marry me, Ranny?"
Her face seemed strange, transformed by the force of an irresistible, a final compulsion. I writhed under her gaze as one on a rack. She hung for a moment, her eyes glittering into mine, positively tremulous; I had never seen Gertrude so serious. I could not bear it. It was excruciating. I know Gertrude was not herself. I leaped from the sofa, her hand still clinging to mine.