rom the ground. A
dizzy nauseated feeling for myself rose up in me against myself and I
was just about to turn on my heels and leave him, I hoped for ever, when
he came over and laid his hand on my shoulder.
"Molly," he said in a voice that might have come down from heaven on
dove wings, "you can't for a moment feel or think that I don't realize
and appreciate what you have been to the motherless little chap, and for
life I am yours at command, as he is. I really thought it would be a
relief to you to have him taken away from you for just a little while
right now, and I still think it is best; but not unless you consent. You
shall have him back whenever you are ready for him, and at all times
both he and I are at your service to the whole of our kingdoms. Just
think the matter over, won't you, and decide what you want me to do?"
Something in me died for ever, I think, when he spoke to me like that.
He's not like other men and there aren't any other men on earth but him!
All the rest are just bugs or bats or something worse. And I'm not
anything myself. There's no excuse for my living and I wish I wasn't so
healthy and likely to go on doing it. It was all over and there was
nothing left for me to live for, and before I could stop myself I buried
my face in my hands.
"Billy asked me to go with him on this awful whale hunt!" I sobbed out
to comfort myself with the thought that somebody did care for me,
regardless of just how I was further embarrassing and complicating
myself in the affairs of the two men I had thought I owned and was now
finding out that I had to give up. I wish I had been looking at him, for
I felt him start, but he said in his big friendly voice that is so
much--and never enough for me.
"Well, why not you and Al come along and make it a family party, if that
is what suits Bill, the boss?"
If men would just buy good, sharp, kitchen knives and cut out women's
hearts in a businesslike way it would be so much kinder of them.
Why do they prefer to use dull weapons that mash the life out slowly?
Everything is at an end for me to-night and that blow did it. It was a
horrible cruel thing for him to say to me! I know now that I have been
in love with John Moore for longer than my honor lets me admit and that
I'll never love anybody else, and that also I have offered myself to him
served up in every known enticement and have had to be refused at least
twice a day for a year. A widow can't say she didn't
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