"Love's a bum thing," he told himself. "If they do get married they die or get a divorce or something; and if they don't--well, Bill has prob'ly committed suicide and Eth is moping around, and most likely now she'll marry that dang St. Ledger." He made a wry face as he thought of St. Ledger. "Runty little mollycoddle! Couldn't lick a chicken--him and his monocle. And that day the wind took his hat and rolled it through the mud, and he said: 'Oh, pshaw!' instead of damn it! Oh--_slush!_ And I promised mother I'd take care of Eth." He burrowed his face deep into the pillow, as, in spite of himself, tears came to his eyes. CHAPTER IV LOVE OR HATE Thus a week passed, in the course of which the heart of the girl was torn by conflicting emotions. Love clashed with hate and self-pity with self-reproach. Was it true--what he had said? Had she administered the final kick to a man who was down--who, loving her--and deep down in her heart she knew that he did love her--had come to her in the extremity of his need for a word of encouragement? Now that he was gone she realized how much he had meant to her. How, in spite of his reckless disregard of life's serious side, she loved him. Try as she would she could not forget the look of deep hurt that dulled his eyes at her words. Had she not been justified? Had he not needed just that to bring him to a realization of his responsibilities? Had she not, at the sacrifice of her own love, spurred and strengthened his purpose to make good? Or, had she, by raising a barrier between them, removed his one incentive to great effort? Over and over the girl pondered these things. One moment her heart cried out for his return, and the next she reiterated her undying hate for the man in whose power it was so sorely to wound her with a word. And so she sat one evening before an open fire in the library which had been the scene of their parting. Mechanically she turned the pages of a novel, but her mind was elsewhere, and her eyes lingered upon the details of the room. "He stood there," she mused, "and I here--and then--those awful words. And, oh! the look in his eyes that day as the portieres closed between us--and he was gone. Where?" Somehow the idea obsessed her that he had gone to sea. She pictured him big and strong and brave, battling before the mast on some wallowing, storm-hectored trading ship outbound, bearing him away into the melting-pot of strange world-ways. Would he come clean through the moil, winning honor and his place among men? And thus would he some day return--to _her_? Or would the sea claim him for her own, roughen him, and buffet him about through the long years among queer Far Eastern hell-ports where, jostling shoulder to shoulder with brutish men and the women who do not care, he would drink deep and laugh loud among the flesh-pots of society's discards?