CHAPTER XXXIV
“FOR HER SAKE”
Into Hugh Alston’s life had come two women, women he had loved, both now engaged to be married to other men, and Hugh Alston was a sorely worried and perplexed man about both of them.
“I’ll go to Cornbridge to-morrow,” said Hugh, and he went.
“Where,” asked Lady Linden, “the dickens have you been?”
“In the country!”
“Isn’t your own country good enough for you?” She looked at him shrewdly. She saw the worry in his face; it was too open and too honest to make concealment of his feelings possible.
Marjorie welcomed him with tearful gladness in her eyes. She said nothing, she held his hand tightly. Not till afterwards did she thank him for coming.
“I felt you would,” she said. “I knew you would!”
And so he was glad he came.
And was she? She wondered, better a thousand times for her and her happiness if she never saw him again. So long as she lived she would not forget those four words that had entered like a sword into her heart and had slain for ever the last hope of happiness for her—“Better than my life!”