Page:The leopard's spots - a romance of the white man's burden-1865-1900 (IA leopardsspotsrom00dixo).pdf/381



HREE weeks before Christmas Gaston began to dream of the visit he was to make to Independence to see Sallie Worth. How long it seemed since she had kissed him in the twilight of that Pullman car and the Limited had rolled away bearing her further and further from his life! He would sit now for an hour reading her last letter, looking at her picture on his desk, and dreaming of what she would say when he sat by her side again in her own home.

And then like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky came a tearful letter announcing another storm at home. Her father had again forbidden her to write. She said, at the last, that Gaston's visit must be postponed indefinitely for the present. He gazed at the letter with a hardened look.

"I will go. I'll face General Worth in his own home, and demand his reasons for such treatment. I am a man I am entitled to the respect of a man." He made this declaration with a quiet force that left no doubt about his doing it.

He wrote Sallie that he could not and would not endure such a fight in the dark with the General, and that he was going to Independence on the day before Christmas as she had planned at first, to have it out with him face to face.

She wrote in reply and begged him under no circum-