A Gamble with Life

by Silas K. Hocking

"Do you mean me to take that as a compliment?" she questioned, playfully.

"Not as an empty compliment," he answered, gravely. "You read beautifully."

She did not reply to that, but her eyes glowed with pleasure.

During the next week or ten days he lived in a kind of fairyland. Every now and then he had an unpleasant feeling that he would wake up sooner or later with a start to discover that the gold was only tinsel, that the rippling streams were dry, and the green and shady meadows a hot and arid desert.

Every day or two Madeline came to see him—came quite naturally and without ceremony. She did not hide from herself the fact that she liked to come. She frankly admitted that she liked the invalid. She told herself that she would be an ungrateful little wretch if she didn't. He had saved her life, and saved it at terrible risk to himself and terrible suffering, and it would be selfish, indeed, on her part if she did not try to cheer and brighten the long days that he was enduring, and enduring so patiently on her account.

Moreover, Rufus Sterne was no ordinary man. He belonged to a type she had not met before. As yet she did not know how to describe him. He was more or less of a mystery to her, and that in itself kindled and sustained her interest. Most of the young men she had met she "saw through" in ten minutes, and in half-an-hour had weighed them up, classified and labelled them.

But Rufus Sterne baffled her. He was altogether too complex for her simple and easy method of analysis, too massive for her six-inch rule. At times he seemed to her a huge bundle of contradictions. His face could be as stern as the granite cliffs, his smile as sweet and winning as spring sunshine. At times he was as silent and mysterious as the sphinx, at other times brimming over with mirth and merriment. His passion for truth and right filled her with admiration, his apparent indifference to all religion struck her with dismay. He was a man of the people in theory, in practice he lived alone, remote and friendless.

It seemed to her sometimes a wonderful condescension on his part that he deigned to notice her at all. Like most of her sex, she did not in her heart think much of girls. She would defend them readily enough if they were attacked, and if driven into a corner would acclaim their superiority over men; but in reality she thought little of them. In the main they were small and niggling, and not particularly magnanimous. Neither did she place herself an inch higher than the average girl. She was as conscious of her own limitations as anybody.

Hence, that this strong, self-reliant man, who was fighting the world single-handed, and toiling to complete some great invention, should make her his friend, tell her that her friendship was very sweet to him, was a compliment greater than had ever been paid to her before.

She had never placed Rufus Sterne for a moment in the same category with Gervase Tregony. Gervase was on her own level. He was not to her a mysterious and unexplored country. She knew him thoroughly, knew what he was capable of; had sounded all his depths and tabulated all his qualifications.