Flaming Youth

CHAPTER XXXIII

"What's all the gloom about, sweetie?"

She released herself not over-gently. "Monty, would you have done what Dupuy did?"

"How do you mean?"

"Broken off your engagement—on that account?"

"Why, yes. Any fellow would." A convincing reason, for him.

"Selden Thorpe wouldn't."

"I'll bet he would. He's a bluff. He makes me sick."

"Well—then—you'd better break ours."

"I don't get you, Pat."

"It's been the same with me as with Elsie Dowden. I've been meaning to tell you."

"I don't believe it," he said violently. "It's a try-on. A trick."

"It's true. You've got to believe it."

"Who's the man?" bayed Monty like a huge dog.

"I'll never tell you."

He gathered his powerful frame together as if to spring upon her. If he did, if he beat her to the ground, choked her into helplessness, Pat thought, she would hate him and love him for it. But his rage ebbed, impotent of its culmination, a little pitiful, a little ridiculous.

[Pg 314]
"Wh-wh-what did you do it for?" It was almost a whimper.

"I don't know. I didn't mean to—at the beginning."

"Did you love him?"

"Yes. I thought I did."

"You love him now," he charged, his fury mounting again.

"I don't! I love you."

"This is a hell of a thing to tell a man you say you love," he faltered plaintively.

"You'd rather I hadn't told you. I'm not built that way! I had to tell."

Instantly he was suspicious. "Had to? Why did you have to?"

"Not for any reason that you'd understand." The slight emphasis on the "you" was the first touch of bitterness she had allowed herself.

"Wouldn't he marry you?"

"I wouldn't marry him."

Monty perceptibly brightened. Pat's womanly intuitions, supersensitised by the strain of the contest, told her why. If, to his male standards, she was a maiden despoiled, she was at least not a woman scorned; her rating had gone up sensibly.

"Where is he now?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen him for a long time. I'll never see him again."

"Pat," with an air of resolute magnanimity—"if you'll tell me who it was I'll marry you anyway."

At that her pale cheeks flamed. "I'm not begging you to marry me, Monty. I'm not that cheap in the market."

"You want our engagement broken?"

"That's up to you. Absolutely. If you think, now[Pg 315] I've told you, that you're so much better and purer than I am because I've done what I did——"

"What d'you mean, better and purer?"

"I suppose you've never had any affair with any girl——"

"Are you trying to pretend to believe that's the same thing?" His voice was incredulous, contemptuous.

"Why isn't it the same thing?"

Young Mr. Standish suffered a paralysis of scandalised amazement. "Because it isn't! For God's sake! You talk like one of those radical freaks that spout on soapboxes."

"I'm not so sure they aren't right about this man-and-woman thing," declared Pat recklessly. In so speaking she felt that she had broken with conventionalities far more than in anything, however bold, previously enunciated in their talk.

Monty's square jaw became ugly. "I'm giving you your chance. You won't tell me the man's name?"

Pat preserved the silence of obstinacy. It was more convincing than any negative. Also more exasperating.

"Good-night!" bellowed her lover, and strode from the room.

Almost immediately he was back, endued with a sad and noble expression. "Nobody shall ever know about this from me, Pat. You're safe."

For three nights Pat washed her troubled soul with tears. Her family knew that there had been a lovers' quarrel; that was all. Pat waited for Monty to break the engagement formally or send her word that he wished her to break it. Through all her grief of bereavement which, she repeatedly told herself, was the most sorrowful depth that her life had yet touched, that any life could touch,[Pg 316] she impatiently awaited the definite solution. Relief from the strain of uncertainty; that was what she craved.

On the fourth evening Monty reappeared. All his nobleness was gone. He was haggard, nerve-racked, forlorn. He threw himself upon her compassion. He implored her. He would forgive everything; he would forget everything; he would make no conditions, if only she would take him back. Life without her——

"All right, Monty-boy," said Pat, really affected by his suffering. "I haven't changed. I love you, Monty. But if ever you let what I've told you make any difference, if ever you speak of it or let me know that you even think of it, I'm through. That minute and forever."

Humbly, abjectly, the upholder of man's superior privilege accepted the absurd condition. The stronger nature had completely dominated the weaker.

Back in his arms again, Pat savoured the delicious warmth of a passion the more ardent for the threat of frustration; the triumph of a crisis valorously met and successfully passed. But an encroaching thought tainted the rapture of the moment. What was it that he himself had so confidently said to Selden Thorpe? Was her splendid and beautiful young lover, holding the views which he had proclaimed and surrendering them so readily, indeed "a poor sort of fish"?