[CHAPTER XII]
[LOVE AND PRIDE]
Betty Winter had found her fierce resolution to blot John Vaughan from her life a difficult one to keep. The first two weeks were not so hard. Every instinct of her pure young girlhood had cried out against the conceit which had imagined her conquest so easy. The memory of his arms about her crushing with cruel force, his hot lips on hers in mad, unasked kisses brought the angry blood mounting to her cheeks. She walked the floor in rage and dropped at last exhausted:
"I could kill him!"
The memory which stung deepest was the terror she had felt in his arms—the sudden fear of the brute quivering in tense muscles and throbbing in passionate kisses. She had thought this man a gentleman. In that flash of self-revealing he was simply a beast. It had unsettled her whole attitude toward life. For the first time she began to suspect the darker side of passion. If this were love, she would have none of it.
Again she resolved for the hundredth time, to banish the last thought of him. If there were no cleaner, more chivalrous men in the world she could live without them. But there were men with holier ideals. Ned Vaughan was one. She drew from the drawer the only letter she had received from him and the last she would probably get in many a day, as he had crossed the dead line of war and was now somewhere in the great silent South. She read it over and over with tender smiles:
"Dear Miss Betty;
"I can't disappear behind the battle lines without a last word to you. I just want to tell you that every hour, waking or dreaming, the memory of you is my inspiration. The hardest task is easy because my heart is beating with your name with every stroke. For me the drums throb it, the bugle calls it. I hear it in the tramp of soldiers, the rumble of gun, the beat of horses' hoofs and the rattle of sabre,—for I am fighting my way back, inch by inch, hour by hour, to you, my love!
"You cannot answer this. There will be no more mails from the South—no more mails from the North until I see you again on the Capitol Hill in Washington. There has never been a doubt in my heart that the South shall win—that I shall win. And when I stand before you then it will not be as conqueror, though victorious. I shall bow at your feet your willing slave. And I shall kiss my chains because your dear hands made them. I can expect no answer to this. I ask none. I need none. My love is enough. It's so big and wonderful it makes the world glorious.