Suddenly the girl carried her hands to her face, a face all the lovelier for its distress. “I don’t—know what—I want,” she gasped.
Her lover stood looking down at her, and his temples grew coldly moist where the veins stood out.
“If you don’t know what you want, dear, I know one thing that you can’t do,” he said. “Under these circumstances, your only chance of happiness would lie in your wanting one thing so much that the rest wouldn’t count.” He paused, and then he, too, moved aside and stood with her, leaning on the rail while in the phosphorescent play of the water and the broken reflections of the low-hung stars he seemed to find a sort of anodyne.
“I said that what you offered was the most I had the right to hope for. That was true. Your father’s objections are legitimate. I owe you both more than I can ever pay—but I won’t add to that debt.”
“I thought,” said the girl miserably, “that I loved 31 you—enough for anything. The shock of all this—has made my mind swirl so that now—I’m not sure of anything.”
“Yes,” he said dully, “I understand.”
Yet perhaps what he understood, or thought he understood, just then was either more or less than implied in the deferential compliance of his voice. This girl had given her promise to an officer and a gentleman with two generations of gallant army record behind him and a promising future ahead. She was talking now to one who, in the words of the Articles of War was neither an officer nor a gentleman and who had been saved from life imprisonment only by influence of her own importuning.
Her own distress of mind and incertitude were so palpable and pathetic that the man had spoken with apology in his voice, because through him she had been forced into her dilemma. Yet, until now, he had been young enough and naïve enough to believe in certain tenets of romance—and, in romance, a woman who really loved a man would not be weighing at such a time her father’s aspirations toward the White House. In romance, even had he been as guilty as perdition, he would have stood in her eyes, incapable of crime. Palpably life and romance followed variant laws and, for a bitter moment, Spurrier wished that the senator had kept hands off, and left him to his fate.
He had heard the senator himself characterized as a man cold-bloodedly ambitious and contemptuous of others and, having seen only the genial side of that prominent gentleman, he had resentfully denied such statements and made mental comment of the calumny that attaches to celebrity.