The two walked on up the road, further away from the toll-house.
"You should not have come back," persisted the girl. "I hoped you never
would. I beg you to go away again, this very night. It is best for us
both. Some day you will find a true woman who is worthy of your love,"
she added with a sob rising in her throat, but Milt in his anger and
resentment failed to rightly interpret its meaning.
"Then you have been fooling me all the while!" he cried, hot with
indignation. "You have made me believe that you cared nothing for
him--that you loathed him, even--well, perhaps you did, but you loved
his money--you've sold yourself for that."
"No! no! Milt, don't say that!" cried the girl imploringly. "I may have
sold myself to him, but not for money--don't think that of me!"
"If not for money--for what?" demanded Derr, sternly. "For what else but
his houses and lands?"
Once again the impulse was strong upon her to confess the truth, yet
swift to follow the impulse came the unhappy knowledge that to do this
would be to seal Milt's fate. If she would save him, she must sacrifice
herself. For his sake her lips must remain mute now, and perhaps
forever.
"It _is_ a sale, an outright sale!" persisted Derr. "You really don't
care for him, you never did. It is only his money you are after--money,
not love has won the day, it always will. I might have known as much,
but I was simple, and had a simple faith. I didn't understand the
falseness of women's hearts."
"Would I have risked my life, as I did, to get you out of the clutches
of the raiders that night, if I had cared nothing for you?" asked Sally
in sharp earnestness, unable longer to bear his reproaches in silence.
"And to what purpose?" demanded her companion. "Why didn't you let them
kill me, as they proposed doing? It would have been kinder to have let
them put me out of the way," he added bitterly.
"Oh, why didn't you stay away, when once you had gone?" she asked. "It
would have been far kinder to me."
"I begin to understand now why you were so anxious to have me go," he
said. "Probably you feared I would make trouble. Did you think I might
attempt to harm your youthful, handsome lover?" he asked, sneeringly.
"No wonder you only cared to talk of the present, not of the future that
night we parted. No wonder you parried my questions when I asked if you
would some day come to me. I marveled then at your strange silence, but
the reason is now as clear as day. All the while you were urging me to
go away, you were expecting to marry him after I had gone! Confess
now--wasn't your word given to him before I went away?"
"Yes," acknowledged Sally, "but let me explain a few things you do not
understand, I"--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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