"Listen, my girl," began her lover, with infinite sympathy and tenderness in his manner, and gravely he re-sketched the elements in the situation as they would apply to her.
Bessie did listen, and as gravely as John spoke to her,—listened until her eyes were first perplexed and then downcast. Sitting thus, seeing nothing, she saw everything; all that it might mean to her to become the partner of this public shame. She thought of her college friends, of her mother with her social aspirations, of her strong and high-standing father and the circle of his business and personal associates; of the part she hoped herself to play in the new political life that was coming to her sex. She saw it and for a moment was afraid, cowering before it as her lover had cowered. John, in an agony of suspense, watched this conflict staging itself graphically upon the features he loved so deeply, gleaning as he waited another two-edged truth, and that truth this: The love of a woman may make a man surpassingly stronger; it may also make him immeasurably weaker. It depends on the woman. He was weaker now. He had accepted her, demanded her of God, and God had given her. She was part of him now. It must no longer be his judgment but their judgment which ruled. She was forming their judgment now. He leaned forward apprehensively, like a criminal awaiting his fate. He had surrendered his independence of action. Had he gained or lost thereby?
Bessie stood up suddenly. Her face was still white, but her square little chin with its softly rounded corners was firmly set.
"Your decision," she affirmed stoutly, "was the right decision. Your course has been the right course. You must not waver now. I command—I compel you to go straight forward. And I will stand with you—go out with you. From this moment on, your duty is my duty; your lot shall be my lot."
A smile of heavenly happiness broke like a sunset on the face of Hampstead.
"Thank God!" he murmured reverently; "thank God!"
And then as a surging Niagara of new strength rushed over him, he clasped her tightly, exclaiming enthusiastically: "I feel strong enough now, strong enough for everything!"
Standing thus, smiling blissfully into each other's faces, the lovers became again the two argonauts upon a shoreless, timeless sea. As they came back, Bessie, a look half mischievous and half bashful upon her face, pleaded softly:
"John! Ask me something, please?"
"Ask you something," her lover murmured, with a look of dutiful affection, "why, there is nothing more that I can ask." He sighed contentedly.