Half an hour afterward Glory and John were passing through the gates into Clement's Inn, with its moonlight and silence, its odour of moistened grass, its glimpse of the stars, and the red and white blinds of its windows lit up round about. John was still talking rapturously. He was now picturing the part which Glory was to play in the life they were to live together. She was to help and protect their younger sisters, the child-women, the girls in peril, to enlist their loyalty and filial tenderness for the hour of temptation.
“Won't it be glorious? To live the life, the real life of warfare with the world's wickedness and woe! Won't it be magnificent? You'll do it too! You'll go down into those slums and sloughs which I've shown you to-night—they are the cradle of shame and sin, Glory, and this wicked London rocks it!—you'll go down into them like a ministering angel to raise the fallen and heal the wounded! You'll live in them, revel in them, rejoice in them, they'll be your battlefield. Isn't that better, far better, a thousand times better, than playing at life, and all its fashions and follies and frivolities?”
Glory struggled to acquiesce, and from time to time in a trembling voice she said “Yes,” and “Oh, yes,” until they came to the door of the Garden House, and then a strange thing happened. Somebody was singing in the drawing-room to the music of the piano. It was Drake. The window was open and his voice floated over the moonlit gardens;
Du liebes Kind, komm' geh mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir.
Suddenly it seemed to Glory that two women sprang into life in her—one who loved John Storm and wished to live and work beside him, the other who loved the world and felt that she could never give it up. And these two women were fighting for her heart, which should have it and hold it and possess it forever.
She looked up at John, and he was smiling triumphantly, “Are you happy?” she asked.
“Happy! I know a hundred men who are a hundred times as rich as I, but not one who is a hundredth part as happy!”
“Darling!” she whispered, holding back her tears. Then looking away from him she said, “And do you really think I'm good enough for a life of such devotion and self-sacrifice?”
“Good enough!” he cried, and for a moment his merry laughter drowned the singing overhead.
“But will the world think so?”