"Then he will—a little later. You will find they are worth changing your plans for."
He fingered the paper-cutter nervously. "John looks like a different man than he was when I last saw him," he said. "He seems at peace with the world at last, to have forgotten—his tragedy. I think you are the cause of it, Mary."
She paled a little. "What do you mean?" His tense voice frightened her.
And then he found he could not voice his fears, could not bear to force her to tell him that he had lost her. "Why, he has learned to depend upon you, and you have given him a new outlook on things, cheered him up, made a man of him again. You have been such a—wonderful friend to him."
She looked at him quizzically, alarmed at his peculiar manner. "Everybody is his friend," she said soberly. "Everybody loves John. He is the salt of the earth."
"He is that," Rodrigo agreed, and he watched her go away from him, back to John.
He sank into his chair, debating his problem. There was in Rodrigo a strange intuition about women. His success with them had, apart from his physical attractiveness, consisted in an ability, far greater than that of the usual predatory male, to understand them. He thought now that he understood Mary. In a quiet, conventional way she had fallen in love with John Dorning, he reasoned from his recent observation of them, and John with her. Their love was still in its budding state. Unless it were interfered with, it would grow steadily into a steadfast union. John would ask her to marry him and she would assent. Her love would be mingled with pity, but yet it would be as near pure love as modern marriages usually subsist upon.
"Unless it were interfered with." In this last meeting with Mary, brief as it had been, Rodrigo detected something that would ordinarily have set his heart to exulting. Mary's coming to him, her eagerness to extend her personal greetings alone, her face and manner, her desire to remain longer and her obvious disappointment at his rather, curt reception of her, had convinced him of something that, never addicted to false modesty, he did not hide.
"Unless it were interfered with." Well, he took a sad little triumph in assuring himself, he could interfere if he chose, successfully interfere. Just now, when she was here, he could have, if he had yielded to his selfish desire, swept her into his arms and made her his forever. He could have killed that budding love for John within her by appealing to the force of her original love for himself, by rushing her off her feet with his superior strength and feeling. He was sure of this.
Mary Drake still loved him, was the refrain that kept pounding in his heart. He could have her now if he wanted to take her. If he remained near her, he would not be able to keep his love silent. He would have to tell her. Every fibre of his being would revolt against the sacrifice. He would not be strong enough to give her up to John, though John needed her, loved her, depended upon her to keep him out of the dark shadows that had so tragically enveloped him.