Page:Cup of Gold-1929.djvu/200
Cup of Gold
gone; he was drawn, yet repelled by this woman, and he felt her power to embarrass him. Morgan closed his eyes, and the figure of a slender little girl with golden hair stood in the darkness of his brain.
“You are like Elizabeth,” he said, in the dull monotone of one dreaming. “You are like, and yet there is no likeness. Perhaps you master the power she was just learning to handle. I think I love you, but I do not know. I am not sure.”
His eyes had been half closed, and when he opened them there was a real woman before him, not the wraith-like Elizabeth. And she was gazing at him with curiosity, and perhaps, he thought, with some affection. It was queer that she had come to him when no one had forced her to come. She must be fascinated. He reached into his memory for the speeches he had built on his way across the isthmus.
“You must marry me, Elizabeth—Ysobel. I think I love you, Ysobel. You must come away with me and live with me and be my wife, under the protection of my name and of my hand.”
“But I am already married,” she interposed; “quite satisfactorily married.”
He had even foreseen this. During the nights of the march he had planned this campaign as carefully as he might have planned a battle.
“But is it right that two, meeting and flaming white fire, should go apart for stark eternity, should trudge off into bleak infinity; that each of these two should bear black embers of a flame that has not burned itself to death? Is there anything under
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