“But you love me, don’t you, Jean?”
“That isn’t the question. What you forget is my own life—the bad start I made, the injury I did Joe. The more I have thought of that the more heartless it grows. And when I first knew you I was a fraud; you thought me a girl, and I had been a married woman and had left the man I married—poor Joe! and he cared so much! And you have been up there in my country, and you know what I came from. My people were just those people—and yours are the strong and rich. I only happened to stray into your life—I don’t belong there. You have all been good to me; but I can’t let you do this. You have too much to give, and I——”
He laughed into her eyes, heeding nothing she said. He was drawing off her gloves, and he flung them down and kissed her hands and held them resisting to his face. Then he turned to the window, his arm clasping her, and looked out upon the darkling city that lay below—a vast amphitheatre, with serried ridges of twinkling lights rising on the distant hills to meet the stars. The glow of the streets and shops stole upward to their window in the towering building. Far away along the river the huge organ-pipes of the great mills sent their cloud of smoke and flame into the amber dusk. Trains moved like bright serpents along the valley. The strength of the iron hills thrilled through him as he looked upon the torches of the gods of power; the city of his birth sang a great psalm to him as he stood there beside the woman he loved.
“Jean, dear, I always loved the way you spoke of ‘my country’—your hills away off yonder; and I want us to learn to speak of my city—our city—in just that way. Harsh things have been said of the old town, and I have done my share, God knows, to make us despised and hated. I want to do what I can, no matter how little it may be, to change all that. You told me I must help myself before I could help others, and when you are sure of me we must do what we can for the poor and the luckless, for the women who strive and the men who fall, here in the City of the Iron Heart. We must carry that with us into our lives.”
Her arms stole round his neck, and her cheek as it touched his was wet. Their lips met in a long kiss.
“Not the iron heart, Wayne dear,” she whispered, “but the City of the Heart of Gold.”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.