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 FLAMING

YOUTH

323

“Yes. I’m to be married to Monty Standish next month.” Even as her lips spoke the words her soul denied them. In the dominant depths of her, she knew that she could never marry Monty Standish now. Her thoughts, so lightly detached from her fiancé by the easy charm of Warren

Graves, had been claimed, coerced, irrevocably

absorbed by the swift-passing phantom presentment of her former lover. The bond created when she had given herself to him was as nothing compared to this imperative summons across the spaces. After a night of passionate struggle, succeeded by resolute thinking, she wired Monty to come on. When he came, she broke the engagement. It was ruthless, cruel, unfair. Pat had no excuses, no extenuations to offer.

She simply stood firm. Monty returned to college, failed of his graduation, and let it be known among his indignant friends and relatives that Pat had ruined his career. Hot and righteous though his wrath was, he never so much as hinted at Pat’s secret.

Stupid, unstable, self-

satisfied, spoiled; the plaster idol of an athlete-worshipping age; but nevertheless a gentleman within whom one flame of honour burned clear and constant behind its dull encasement.

Pat’s family variously raged, begged, and protested. Pat let them. They prophesied social ostracism for her. She shrugged away the suggestion as improbable in the first place and not worth worrying about anyway. But she would have gone away had it not been for her selfassumed responsibility to her broken brother-in-law. And it was from him that her main support came. From the first he stood by her unquestioning. “You're awfully good to me, Jimmie-jams,” she said one day as she was wheeling him in the garden, having dis-