l, John," she said simply.

He turned very pale, and, drawing her to him, kissed her solemnly.

"It's until death, little one!"

"Until death!" she repeated gravely.

Then they both sat down together and enthusiastically began to make
plans for the future.

It was not without due premeditation that Madison had entered into this
affair. He was not the kind of man to undertake anything lightly.
Everything he had done in his life had been long and well thought out.
He liked this girl and he wanted her for his wife. Both her beauty and
her personality pleased him. He knew that she was not the kind of woman
to whom men usually give their names, but he had never been
conventional. He ridiculed and scoffed at the conventions. He made his
own social laws and cared not a rap for the good or bad opinion of the
world. If there had been opportunities to meet decent women, of good
social standing, he had always thrown them aside with the exclamation
that such women bored him to death, and in all his relations with the
opposite sex there had never entered into his heart a feeling or idea
of real affection until now. He fell, for a moment only, under the
spell of Laura's fascination, and then, drawing aloof, with cold logic
he analyzed her and found out that while outwardly she had every sign
of girlhood ingenuousness, sweetness of character and possibility of
affection, spiritually and mentally she was nothing more than a moral
wreck. At the beginning of their acquaintance he had watched with
covert amusement her efforts to win him, and he had likewise noted her
disappointment at her failure--not, he believed, that she cared so much
for him personally, but that it hurt her vanity not to be successful
with this big, good-natured, penniless bohemian, when men of wealth and
position she made kneel at her feet. From afar he had watched her
slowly changing point of view, how from an artificial ingenuousness she
became serious, womanly, sincere. He knew that he had awakened in her
her first decent affection, and he knew that she was awakening in him
his first desire to accomplish things and be big and worth while. So,
together, these two began to drift toward a path of decent dealing,
decent ambition, decent thought and decent love, until at last they had
both found themselves, acknowledged all the badness of what had been,
and planned for all the goodness of what was to be.

Laura's immediate task, and assuredly it was both a diffic