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296 John Taylor who was now being kept impatiently waiting. So much, to preserve her standing.

Phil Rowe telephoned daily. He had come once for an afternoon and the visit had caused the lifting of eyebrows and a deal of whispering, but Marcia had been cryptic in response to attempts to draw her out and they learned little. But to Phil Rowe she gave her lips again and laughed close in his face, with her arms about his neck.

Rowe was as keen and ruthless in love as he was in business. He wanted this girl with all the intensity of a selfish heart; he saw through her, knew that she would go to any one of a score of men who might bid the highest, knew that she had favored John Taylor above himself. But there were two things in life he wanted: control of the Taylor millions and possession of Marcia Murray. The latter was dependent on the first and he was bound to have them both.

He learned soon that John Taylor had slipped through her wily fingers and knew, therefore, that her one hope of marrying the Taylor fortune was in marrying him. Marcia was not wholly aware of this factor. For a time she believed she had succeeded in making Rowe think that John still regarded her as his promised wife and she held to this lie while she told herself again and again that Taylor was a fool and that she was well rid of him.

But there were nights when she lay sleepless and miserable and even desperate. Give her credit for this: beneath her exterior, which was as hard and cold as glass, there was a sense of human values and when she saw that her appeal had not been able to compete with the wholesome womanhood of the girl of the forest, she had her periods of heartache and tears. And something else