An hour later Mrs. Westmore had gone to her room and Alice had been singing his favorite songs. Her singing always had a peculiar influence over Richard Travis—a moral influence, which, perhaps, was the secret of its power; and all influence which is permanent is moral. There was in it for him an uplifting force that he never experienced save in her presence and under the influence of her songs.
He was a brilliant man and he knew that if he won Alice Westmore it must be done on a high plane. Women were his playthings—he had won them by the score and flung them away when won. But all his life—even when a boy—he had dreamed of finally winning Alice Westmore and settling down.
Like all men who were impure, he made the mistake of thinking that one day, when he wished, he could be pure.
Such a man may marry, but it is a thing of convenience, a matter in which he selects some woman, who he knows will not be his mistress, to become his housekeeper.
And thus she plods along in life, differing eventually only from his mistress in that she is the mother of his children.
In all Richard's longings, too, for Alice Westmore, there was an unconscious cause. He did not know it because he could not know.
Sooner or later love, which is loose, surfeits and sours. It is then that it turns instinctively to the pure, as the Jews, straying from their true God and meeting the chastisement of the sword of Babylon, turned in their anguish to the city of their King.
Nature is inexorable, and love has its laws as fixed as those which hold the stars in their course. And woe to the man or woman who transgresses! He who, ere it is ripe, deflowers the bud of blossoming love in wantonness and waste, in after years will watch and wait and water it with tears, in vain, for that bloom will never come.
She came over by the fire. Her face was flushed; her beautiful sad eyes lighted with excitement.
“Do you remember the first time I ever heard you sing, Alice?”