"Shirley, don't be in any hurry. Laurie and I will wait for you in the
ante-room--" And as they passed out Challoner called: "Wait until you
see that concrete hospital, Murgatroyd!"
For moments that seemed hours Shirley and Murgatroyd stood facing each
other, neither having the courage to speak, the girl filled with shame
at the great wrong she had done to the man she loved; while he, feeling
as if the burden that had rested upon his soul had at last rolled away,
was drawing deep breaths--breathing like a man who has suddenly come out
of darkness into the daylight. Shirley was the first to break the
silence; and now looking up at Murgatroyd, with a little shake of the
head she asked:--
"Billy, do you care to know what I think of you?"
"Perhaps, if I had cared less, I----"
But not for a moment would Shirley listen now to his censuring himself
further, and quickly she cut him off.
"I think it was a far finer thing to take the money and not touch it,"
she declared with true feminine logic, "than never to have taken it at
all."
"But what if this habit should grow upon me," he retorted smilingly.
"Evidently Miss Bloodgood doesn't know what graft awaits me in
Washington?"
Shirley laughed softly.
"To think that you accomplished all this without money," she said
happily.
"But the worst is yet to come," he observed quickly. "It means that one
has to keep up the social game, the club game, the political game, and
the Lord knows what other games on five thousand--or is it now
seventy-five hundred a year? It means that an unmarried man must starve;
and Heaven help the married senator! For he and his family must live on
a back street in the capital and freeze. That's what it means to a
senator who lives on his salary."
"But doesn't poverty always travel hand in hand with greatness," she
remarked enthusiastically, and with superb disdain for anything that she
may have said heretofore to the contrary.
Murgatroyd looked at her with admiration. Never before had her eyes
seemed to him so blue and so lovely.
"There's one thing--one thing that I didn't tell Challoner and his
wife," he said, lowering his voice almost to a whisper. "Can you guess
what that something was that always made me keep my hands off those iron
boxes?"
Shirley lifted her eyes to his in quick understanding.
"It was my love for the woman who wanted me to be great," he went on in
a voice so shaken with emotion, that she scarcely recognised it as
belonging to him. "That was the motive that beat down all others."
"And will you forgive the foolish lips that told you to go wrong?"
For answer he held out his arms to her and she came to them. Then he
stooped down, and catching her face between his hands, raised it slowly,
and kissed the lips tenderly, murmuring lovingly:--
"Her soul would not let me go wrong."
After a moment Shirley slowly drew herself out of his arms and placing a
hand on each of his shoulders, asked laughingly, looking deep into his
eyes:--
"And we'll go to Washington?"
"Yes, dear," he smiled back. "We're going to Washington--to freeze and
starve together on that back street--Yes, my revenge is now complete."
Before he could kiss her a second time, Shirley darted to the door,
opened it and called:--
"Miriam, Laurie, come here--come back!"
One look at the face of the girl that she had left in the office was
sufficient to tell Miriam that she had great news to communicate.
Nevertheless, she asked innocently:--
"What for, my dear? Are you going to lynch him?"
Blushing furiously, Shirley waved her hand at the boxes on the table and
said:--
"Billy says that you've gone off and forgotten all your money!"