“Glory, my sweetheart, I’ve been playing a game for big stakes. I’ve had to do some things I didn’t relish. I’ve got to do another now. I’m summoned to Harrison’s office in New York, at once—and I have no choice.”
Glory drew away and looked with challenging directness into his eyes.
“I suppose—you’ll go alone?”
“I must. Business affairs are at a crisis, and I need a free hand. But, God granting me a safe return, it’s to be our last separation. I swear that. I am always wretched without you.”
Always before when disappointment or disquiet had riffled the deeps of her eyes, it had taken only a word and a smile from this man to dispel them and bring back the serenity of content. Her moments of panic when she had seemed to drop down, down into pits of foreboding until she had plumbed the depth of despair, had been moments to which she had surrendered in his absence and of which he had been given no hint.
Now with a gravity that was bafflingly unreadable she stood silent and looked about the room, and the man’s eyes followed hers.
Why was it, he almost fiercely demanded of himself, that this cottage set in remote hills shed about him a feeling of soul-satisfaction that he had never encountered in more luxurious places?
Now as he looked at it the thought of leaving it cramped his heart with a sort of breathless agony.
Yet, of course, there was no question after all. It was because in everything it was reflection of Glory’s own spirit and to him Glory stood for the only love that had ever been bigger to him than himself.