Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/392

 "I tried to be a three-bagger, wit' bells on. And I turned out to be only an also-ran!"

"You're the bravest woman I ever knew," Wilsnach tried to tell her. "And instead of me saving your life, you—"

He could not finish. She smiled again as she stared mistily up at him. Her fingers were clinging to his arm, hungrily, and she seemed to be following her own lonely furrow of thought.

"I ain't goin' to lose yuh, anyhow. I might've done that, yuh know, tryin' to make good and not bein' able to. And that would've been far worse than—than this!"

A look of contentment crept into her face at Wilsnach's impassioned little cry of "You could never have lost me!" Then it merged into a look of wisdom touched with pity, for she felt in her secret soul of souls that he was wrong. And her fingers still clutched at him, as though seeking in the misty dissolution of all life some final tangibility which might remain stable.

"Will yuh kiss me?" she asked, as simply as a child.

He kissed her. As he did so he struggled to