"Please don't, Selwyn." The hand I had drawn away I held out to him.
"We must not think or talk of ourselves to-day. This is not our day."

"But I want my day." His strong fingers twisted into mine with
bruising force. "I have waited long for it. For all others you have
consideration, but my happiness alone you ignore. You seem to think
my endurance is beyond limit. How long are you going to keep this
thing up? Some day you are going to marry me. Why not to-day?"

I shook my head. "I cannot marry you today. Take care--" The
conductor was coming down the aisle toward us.




CHAPTER XXV

By the time we learn a few of the lessons life teaches we stop
living. I should have known it is the unexpected that happens, but I
forgot it. What I expected at Claxon did not come to pass.

At a little station a few miles east of the tiny town to which we
were going, Tom and Madeleine left our train and waited for a
crawling accommodation to Shelby, where, later, they would be
married. From the car window I waved to them and tried to transmit a
portion of my courage, for which there was no credit, and of my
enjoyment, of which I should have been ashamed and was not ashamed.
A taste for adventure will ever be a part of me, and I was getting
much more pleasure out of an unexpected experience than Madeleine