"Listen quietly, Ben dear, and I will tell you. Before I came out here I thought I loved a man, and he—well, he did not treat me well. I had trusted him and every one else implicitly until the very moment when----I felt it very much, and I came West with Jim to get away from the old scenes. Now I know that it was only fascination, but it was very real then. You do not like that, Ben, do you? The memory is not pleasant to me, and yet," she said, with a wistful little break of the voice, "if it hadn't been for that I would not have been the woman I am, and I could not love you, dearest, as I do. It is never in the same way twice, but each time something better and higher is added to it. Oh, my darling, I do love you, I do love you so much, and you must be always my generous, poetic boy, as you are now."
She strained his hands to her as though afraid he would slip from her clasp. "All that is ideal so soon hardens. I can not bear to think of your changing."
Bennington leaned forward and their lips met. "We will forgive him," he murmured.
And what that remark had to do with it only our gentler readers will be able to say.
Ah, the delicious throbbing silence after the first kiss!
"What was your decision that afternoon on the Rock, Ben? You never told me." She asked presently, in a lighter tone, "Would you have taken me in spite of my family?"
He laughed with faint mischief.
"Before I tell you, I want to ask you something," he said in his turn. "Supposing I had decided that, even though I loved you, I must give you up because of my duty to my family—suppose that, I say—what would you have done? Would your love for me have been so strong that you would have finally confessed to me the fact that the Lawtons were not your parents? Or would you have thrown me over entirely because you thought I did not love you enough to take you for yourself?"
She considered the matter seriously for some little time.
"Ben, I don't know," she confessed at last frankly. "I can't tell."