“No, I suppose it isn’t,” he acknowledged equably. “But I’m going to do it, all the same. Probably I’ll never get you to myself again—alone on the top of the world. But I’ll promise you one thing”—his voice deepened to a sudden gravity. “This is going to be the last time I make love to you. If you say ‘no’ to me now, I shall accept it, and it will be ‘no’ for always.”
Ann’s heart beat a little more quickly.
“Tony—” she began protestingly.
“No. Hear me out. I know what’s the matter. You don’t trust me. You’re afraid, if you marry me, that I’ll let you down—as my father let my mother down. But I won’t! I swear it.” He stood still and, slipping his arm from under hers, took both her hands in his and held them tightly. “If you’ll marry me, Ann, I promise you that I’ll give up gambling—every form of it—from this day forth.”
“You couldn’t!” she broke in hastily.
“I could do anything—for you,” he answered simply. “Because I love you.”
There was something very touching in the boyish declaration. Ann looked up and saw his face in the moonlight, white and rather stern. It made her think of the face of some young knight of bygone days taking a sacred vow before he set forth to seek and find the Holy Grail.
He bent down to her.
“Ann, darling,” he said gently. “I love you so much. Won’t you marry me?”
She felt her heart contract. He had asked her many times before—sometimes half jestingly, sometimes with a sudden imperious passion that would fain have swept everything before it. But this was different. There was a gravity, an earnestness in his speech which she could not lightly brush aside. Alone here, under the wide sky, with only God’s open spaces round them, it seemed to her as though his question and her answer to it must partake of the same solemnness as vows exchanged within the hallowed walls of a sanctuary.