Page:Achmed Abdullah--Wings.djvu/121

Rh stock-broking chap with a steam-yacht, a garage full of imported, low-slung motor-cars, a red-brick-and- white-woodwork house on the conservative side of Eleventh Street, a few doors from Fifth Avenue, a place in Westchester County at exactly the correct distance between suburbia and yokeldom; four servants, including a French—not an English—butler; and a mother who dressed in black bombazine and bugles.

"Yes," she had said in a weak, wiped-over voice, "I am going to marry Dan."

"Because you love him—and because you don't love me?"

"Yes, Roger!"

He had laughed—a cracked, high-pitched laugh that had twisted his dark, handsome face into a sardonic mask. "You lie, my dear," he had replied brutally, and when she gasped and blushed he had continued: "You lie—and you know you do! You love—me! I can feel it in my heart, my soul, in every last fiber and cell of my being. I can feel it waking and sleeping. Your love is mine, quite mine—a thing both definite and infinite. You don't love Dan!"

"But—"