"But you must marry me," pleaded Orde. "We are made for each other.
God meant us for each other."
"It would have to be after a great many years," she said doubtfully.
She pulled the bell, which jangled faintly in the depths of the
house.
"Good-night," she said. "Come to me to-morrow. No, you must not
come in." She cut short Orde's insistence and the eloquence that
had just found its life by slipping inside the half-open door and
closing it after her.
Orde stood for a moment uncertain; then turned away and walked up
the street, his eyes so blinded by the greater glory that he all but
ran down an inoffensive passer-by.
At the hotel he wrote a long letter to his mother. The first part
was full of the exultation of his discovery. He told of his good
fortune quite as something just born, utterly forgetting his
mother's predictions before he came East. Then as the first
effervescence died, a more gloomy view of the situation came
uppermost. To his heated imagination the deadlock seemed complete.
Carroll's devotion to what she considered her duty appeared
unbreakable. In the reaction Orde doubted whether he would have it
otherwise. And then his fighting blood surged back to his heart.
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