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Page 26
"Thank God!" Katherine said, slowly and distinctly, and North stared in
astonishment.
"What?" His tone was incredulous.
"Oh; don't take me so seriously," said the girl, impatiently. "It's only
that I can't sympathize with your multimillionaire, who loses a little
of his heaps of money, against some poor soul to whom that little may
mean life or death--life or death, maybe, for his nearest and dearest.
Mr. Litterny has had a small loss, which he won't feel in a year from
now. The thief, the rascal, the scoundrel, as you call him so fluently,
has escaped for now, perhaps, with his ill-gotten gains, but he is a
hunted thing, living with a black terror of being found out--a terror
which clutches him when he prays and when he dances. It's the thief I'm
sorry for--I'm sorry for him--I'm sorry for him." Her voice was agitated
and uneven beyond what seemed reasonable.
"'The way of the transgressor is hard,'" Norman North said, slowly, and
looked across the shifting sand-stretch to the inevitable sea, and
spoke the words pitilessly, as if an inevitable law spoke through him.
They cut into the girl's soul. A quick gasp of pain broke from her, and
the man turned and saw her face and sprang to his feet.
"Come," he said,--"come home," and held out his hands.
She let him take hers, and he lifted her lightly, and did not let her
hands go. For a second they stood, and into the silence a deep boom of
the water against the beach thundered and died away. He drew the hands
slowly toward him till he held them against him. There seemed not to be
any need for words.
Half an hour later, as they walked back through the sweet loneliness of
Springfield Avenue, North said: "You've forgotten something. You've
forgotten that this is the day you were to tell me why you had the bad
manners to laugh at me before you knew me. Now that we are engaged it's
your duty to tell me if I'm ridiculous."
There was none of the responsive, soft laughter he expected. "We're not
engaged--we can't be engaged," she threw back, impetuously, and as he
looked at her there was suffering in her face.
"What do you mean? You told me you loved me." His voice was full of its
curious mixture of gentleness and sternness, and she shrank visibly from
the sternness.
"Don't be hard on me," she begged, like a frightened child, and he
caught her hand with a quick exclamation. "I'll tell you--everything.
Not only that little thing about my laughing, but--but more--everything.
Why I cannot be engaged to you. I must tell you--I know it--but, oh! not
to-day--not for a little while! Let me have this little time to be
happy. You sail a week from to-day. I'll write it all for you, and you
can read it on the way to New York. That will do--won't that do?" she
pleaded.
North took both her hands in a hard grasp and searched her face and her
eyes--eyes clear and sweet, though filled with misery. "Yes, that will
do," he said. "It's all nonsense that you can't be engaged to me. You
are engaged to me, and you are going to marry me. If you love me--and
you say you do,--there's nothing I'll let interfere. Nothing--absolutely
nothing." There was little of the saint in his look now; it was filled
with human love and masterful determination, and in his eyes smouldered
a recklessness, a will to have his way, that was no angel, but all man.
A week later Norman North sailed to New York, and in his pocket was a
letter which was not to be read till Bermuda was out of sight. When the
coral reef was passed, when the fairy blue of the island waters had
changed to the dark swell of the Atlantic, he slipped the bolt in the
door of his cabin and took out the letter.
"I laughed because you were so wonderfully two men in one," it began, "I
was in the church at St. George's the day when you sent the verger away
and went into the pulpit and said parts of the service. I could not tell
you this before because it came so close to the other thing which I must
tell you now; because I sat trembling before you that day, hidden in the
shadow of a gallery, knowing myself a criminal, while you stood above me
like a pitiless judge and rolled out sentences that were bolts of fire
emptied on my soul. The next morning I heard you reciting Limericks. Are
you surprised that I laughed when the contrast struck me? Even then I
wondered which was the real of you, the saint or the man,--which would
win if it came to a desperate fight. The fight is coming, Norman.
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