"Sarah! You don't mean that you are going to marry him!"
"Why, what else is there to do?"
"But, Sarah ..." I lay down again. After all what else was there to do?
"You know, Olivia, you have never really loved anybody." I had no answer to that; suddenly she broke out shaking the bed with her sobs. "Oh, my dear, my dear, it is true that he loved me. It is true. He came back to me as soon as he was free. Oh, Olive, if you had known what it is all these years not to know if it was true! If he hadn't only taken me just as a stop-gap ... a fancy ... how was I to know?"
I didn't think very much of the proof that he loved her now. Sarah, beautiful, prosperous, was a goal for any man to strive toward, even without the necessity which was written in every line of Leon Griffin Lawrence.
"Sarah," I questioned gently, "do you mean to say you've loved him all this time, that you love him now?" She left off sobbing to answer me with that steady, patient truth with which she met any issue of life.
"I loved him ... all the love I had I gave him. It's not the same now, of course; its wings are broken, but it is his. Once you've given you can't take it back again."
"But he—he has no claim on you now. Sarah, do you need to marry him?"
"I am married to him."
"But, Sarah ... look here, Sarah, it isn't true that I have never loved. I didn't love the man I was married to, but I have learned something about love; I've learned that marriage without it is a thing no self-respecting woman should go into."