“I have always liked John, you know—John with the crimson name.” She was glad of both letters; they both revealed something she had no other way of learning. She had not hurt John beyond recovery, and Lottie would have something she wished for most.
“Don will be glad to take the responsibility of you. You give him another reason for staying alive.”
“Hasn’t he reasons enough—without me?”
“He ought to have,” was the serious reply. “Everybody should have, excepting yourself.”
“Myself appears to be the chief reason to me.”
“Take as much time as you like to decide—and remember, you go of your own free will.”
“Roger, you know it isn’t that I choose to go—” she began, earnestly.
“Oh, no,” he said, as he turned away, “not Caesar less, but Rome more.”
He went into the study and shut the door.
“The child, the child,” he groaned, “she has no more thought of me than—Uncle Cephas.”