He laughed into her eyes, heeding nothing she said. He was drawing
off her gloves, and he flung them down and kissed her hands and held
them resisting to his face. Then he turned to the window, his arm
clasping her, and looked out upon the darkling city that lay below--a
vast amphitheatre, with serried ridges of twinkling lights rising on
the distant hills to meet the stars. The glow of the streets and shops
stole upward to their window in the towering building. Far away along
the river the huge organ-pipes of the great mills sent their cloud of
smoke and flame into the amber dusk. Trains moved like bright serpents
along the valley. The strength of the iron hills thrilled through him
as he looked upon the torches of the gods of power; the city of his
birth sang a great psalm to him as he stood there beside the woman he
loved.
“Jean, dear, I always loved the way you spoke of ‘my country’--your
hills away off yonder; and I want us to learn to speak of my city--our
city--in just that way. Harsh things have been said of the old town,
and I have done my share, God knows, to make us despised and hated. I
want to do what I can, no matter how little it may be, to change all
that. You told me I must help myself before I could help others, and
when you are sure of me we must do what we can for the poor and the
luckless, for the women who strive and the men who fall, here in the
City of the Iron Heart. We must carry that with us into our lives.”
Her arms stole round his neck, and her cheek as it touched his was wet.
Their lips met in a long kiss.
“Not the iron heart, Wayne dear,” she whispered, “but the City of the
Heart of Gold.”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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