“How would you have finished it? What would you have done if you had been in Amy Linder’s place?” Philip inquired, and shooting a glance of curiosity at the flushed, earnest face beside him.
“I certainly would not have drooped and died,” she returned, with a scornful curl of her lips. “I never would have given the man who had so wronged me the satisfaction of knowing how thoroughly he had fooled me.”
“Ah, you tell what you would not have done; but, on the other hand, what would have been your course of action?”
Miss Athol drew her willowy figure proudly erect, and her fine eyes blazed with the dauntless spirit within her.
“I would have lived it down,” she said, her voice vibrating with intense feeling. “I would have risen above it, and some day, later on, I would have caused that man to wonder if he had not made the greatest mistake of his life; he should have learned to despise himself for having so belittled himself and dishonored his manhood by trying to wreck the happiness of a defenseless girl simply for amusement.”
She was glorious as she gave utterance to these animated sentences and Philip was, for the moment, carried beyond himself by the magnetic influence of her beauty and her spirit. He caught the white hand that lay nearest him, and impulsively pressed it to his lips.
“Ah! no one could ever meet, play the part of lover to you, and then leave you,” he cried, with a thrill of passion in his tones. “I——”
“Oh, I wonder where Minnie is!” Gertrude interposed, and withdrawing her hand before he could complete what he was about to say. “Great heavens, what was that?”
Both sprang to their feet as a frightened scream at that instant fell upon their ears, and turned their terrified faces toward the sound just in season to see the flutter of white garments as they disappeared over the edge of the plateau, not a dozen yards from where they stood.