A Fool for Love by Francis Lynde
page 101 of 131 (77%)
page 101 of 131 (77%)
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from the other side of the canyon?
The detour took him past the slide in silent safety, but it did not take him immediately back to the Rosemary. Instead of keeping on down the canyon on the C. G. R. side, he turned up the gulch at the back of Argentine and spent the better half of the afternoon tramping beneath the solemn spruces on the mountain. What the hours of solitude brought him in the way of decision let him declare as he sets his face finally toward the station and the private car. "I can't do it: I can't turn traitor to the kinsman whose bread I eat. And that is what it would come to in plain English. Beyond that I have no right to go: it is not for me to pass upon the justice of this petty war between rival corporations." Ah, William Calvert! is there no word then of that other and far subtler temptation? When you have reached your goal, if reach it you may, will there be no remorseful looking back to this mile-stone where a word from you might have taken the fly from your pot of precious ointment? The short winter day was darkening to its close when he returned to the Rosemary. By dint of judicious manoeuvering, with a too-fond Bessie for an unconscious confederate, he managed to keep Virginia from questioning him; this up to a certain moment of climaxes in the evening. But Virginia read momentous things in his face and eyes, and when the time was fully ripe she cornered him. It was the old story over again, of a woman's determination to know pitted against a truthful man's |
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