Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/423

 sion characterized it; and its breathless moments were followed presently by little bursts of confidence.

"We understand each other this time," Henry reflected gratefully; "you take me for what I am."

"And you take me for what I'm not," Billie said with a little laugh. "Oh, Henry! My money's gone, I haven't got a thing but you; and I never felt so rich in all my life. And, oh, I'm so glad I couldn't bend you—make you into a conceited imperialist of business. You remembered the little cases still, and it's because you were true in the little things that you made good in the big things."

"You're the first big thing I ever made good in," insisted Henry fondly, "and I came near messing that. We'll get married and we'll shake the ashes of this place off our feet and get away and never see it again."

"Never see it again?" Billie exclaimed in amazement. "Why, you're going to be receiver of Boland General," she told him, and in her blue eyes there was just a faint return of the old imperiousness, and it made her wonderfully attractive.

"Oh, am I?" ejaculated Henry, suddenly doubtful as he looked into those violet deeps and began to take new account of all that lay behind them.

"Why, yes, Henry; you are," she told him, though not imperiously; merely as reminding him of a duty.

As accepting the reminder Harrington turned, still with his arm around the slender grace in the tweed coat beneath which he could feel a heart beating so happily—turned and looked out upon that scarred, chimney-stabbed segment of ruins that lay beneath his vision and with his mind's eye also that wide band of mourning on both sides the inlet where the Boland