"What miserable lesson have you learned to teach you such a creed?" she asked. "I tell you the world is full of happy marriages--full of honoured husbands and beloved wives, and children worshipped and adored----"
"Children, yes, they come the nearest to making the conventional contract endurable. I wish to God you had some!"
He said, almost savagely: "If you _can_, and _don't_, you'll make a hell for yourself with any man, sooner or later--mark my words! And it isn't worth while to enact the hypocrisy of marriage with nothing more than legal license in view! Why bother with priest or clergyman? That contract won't last. And it's less trouble not to make one at all than to go West and break one."
"Do you know you are talking very horridly to me?" she said.
"Yes--I suppose I am. I've got to be going now, anyway----"
As he spoke, the glittering house became dark; the curtain opened upon a dim scene of shadowy splendour, into which, exquisite and bewitchingly immortal as any goddess in the heavenly galaxy, glided Farrar, in the shimmering panoply of _Ariane_.
[Illustration: "Desboro stood staring down at the magic picture. Mrs. Clydesdale, too, had risen"]
Desboro stood staring down at the magic picture. Mrs. Clydesdale, too, had risen. Below them the beauty of Farrar's matchless voice possessed the vast obscurity, searching the darkness like a ray of crystal light. One by one the stone crypts opened, disclosing their tinted waterfalls of jewels.
"I've got to go," he whispered. "Your people will be arriving."
"Then--I suppose I can't help _that_ sort. Men are--that way. Was it that girl at Silverwood?"
"You found it necessary to be at Silverwood when she was there?"
"I'm glad. It hurt, Jim. Some people I know at Willow Lake saw her. They said she was unusually beautiful."
"Elena," he said, "will you kindly come to your senses? I'm not going to marry anybody; but that doesn't concern you. I advise you to attend to your own life's business--which is to have children and bring them up more decently than the present generation are being brought up in this fool of a town! If nothing else will make your husband endurable, children will come nearest to it----"
"For heaven's sake, don't cry!" he whispered.