“Gordon,” she said unevenly, “you’re going to keep at me and keep at me until you make me your wife, aren’t you?” There was no rebuke in her voice.
“In what other way, dear, does a man win the heart of the woman he loves?”
Madelaine sprang from the divan and walked down the room. She threw up her soft, bare, beautiful arms. From her throat came a cry.
“Yes, I’m different—different!—different because romance has never come to me as it has come to other girls—sweet, wild romance that would make me love a man so deeply and fiercely I’d follow him over the world and live with him in a hovel, to be close beside him!—love him so that he would beat me, if you please, and I could suffer it—because I loved him! Oh, Gordon! Gordon! You may win, after all, for you’ve overcome the most of any man I’ve ever known. But you’ll never know the heart of a woman! You’ll never know! You’ll never know!”
He kissed her hand when he left her at the door that night. Despite his great love, despite the inspiration she was in his life—was he hurting her by denying her that Great Romance she might possibly find after he had married her?
For that would be a terrific hurt. Madelaine would be true as steel to any man whom she had once promised to love, honor and cherish, come what might, afterward. She was that kind of woman.
CHAPTER IX
THE LAST STRAW
I
Nathan was facing the prospect of a dreary, rainy Sunday in a Wilkes-Barre hotel when that “turning-point” telegram arrived from Thorne. Since that day in Springfield when he had received a wire from Mildred concerning his child’s death, telegrams had not been without a flavor of calamity. Yet Thorne’s message on its face looked harmless enough. It read: