“Dear me, no!” laughed Anne. “I feel more like work than usual; there is a load rolled off, isn’t there?”
Anne had set down her problem in accurate figures, and had solved it. There was nothing in the way of her making Richard as happy as she could make him, except selfishness. She wanted the love that had not come to her, which was to her the ideal approach to marriage. This ideal was the true one, but her case was altered by circumstances. First of all, there was no one whom she loved better than Richard Latham. If there were, she could not have been untrue to that love, whether or not it led to joy. Richard Latham was not only a man to be honoured for his genius, pitied for his blindness, but he was a man to be loved for himself. Rarely would any woman find in one person the qualities which he united in himself; the manliness with the delicacy; the tenderness with the courage; the unbending austerity with the unfailing mercy. He could love a woman as few men could love one; he would idealize her while protecting her; serve her in all humility, yet expect from her all the goodness and strength that was in her. Anne had decided that if Richard really were giving her this power and wanted her, it was not for her to refuse his wealth, nor further impoverish one who had been so bereft. Having reached her decision, she went serenely on her way, characteristically debating it no more; ready to give if the demand were made, desiring nothing except not to fail either Richard or herself.
This morning Richard resumed the dictation of his third act; Anne, pen in hand, set down the cabalistic signs which Richard had once accused of signifying more than he could produce.
Suddenly she paused, her pen suspended, a shocked expression on her face.
“But, Mr. Latham, why are you saying this?” she cried. “What are you doing with this act? This dialogue? You are turning it all wrong!”
“No,” said Richard. “I am not going to follow my first plan. Our friend, the hero, is not to be made happy, after all! I am separating him from his beloved. They are not to marry, as we meant them to. It won’t affect the two preceding acts; it will merely make another play of it, perhaps a sadder one, but not a weaker one—better, I think. Don’t you approve?”
“Indeed I do not!” cried Anne. “Why do you want to martyr him? And to frustrate that beautiful, ideal love! It’s unbearable! I can’t take the dictation that does this! And really, Mr. Latham, it will frustrate the play as well as the hero’s life. Don’t you think we all want the happy ending? It is always possible to get it in a play or a story! I’m sure the public will rebel, that your play will never succeed if you change your plot. No one ever drew a more ideal love than you have in the acts already written. And to spoil it all, sever these two who have dared for each other, borne for each other with such courage, yet so nobly, so wisely! Oh, why do you want to do it?”
“What a little enthusiast!” said Richard. “I am forced to do it. I can’t tell you why, Anne—Miss Dallas—but I’ve wholly lost the power to end it as I at first intended. It’s got to be a tragedy, a bloodless but poignant tragedy. I don’t know any other ending. I’ll make our nice girl happy with the nice youth, but for the man——” He shook his head after a moment’s hesitation. “I know no other end,” he repeated.
Anne laid down her pen. Her face wore an uplifted look, unlike the look with which a woman goes to her lover, but nevertheless she arose and went to her lover. She knelt beside him and took his hand.
“Why do you know no happy end for him?” she asked.