“What name?”
“Your—your married name.”
“Then you don't know?” she gasped. The brain of Cyrus the Gaunt suddenly went numb. “I know you went away from us to get married.”
“I did,” she quavered. “But I couldn't. I—I—I tried to make myself go through with it. I couldn't. No woman could when—when—” Her voice trembled into silence.
A boisterous back-draft of the tempest thrust its way through the door and puffed out the little vestibule light. With a sense of irreparable loss impending he felt, rather than heard, her moving from him into the blackness of the outer world. Yet his mind seemed clogged and chained as he strove to grasp the meaning of what she had said—or was it what she had left unsaid?
And in a moment she would be gone forever.
Suddenly—miracle of miracles!—he felt those soft, strong hands on his arm, and heard her sobbing appeal: “Oh, Cyrus! Aren't you ever going to smile at me inside again?”
His arms went out. The Bonnie Lassie's hands slipped up to his shoulder. The flower-face pressed, close and cold and sweet, against his.