A WOMAN'S LOGIC
The boom in the shares of the Trumpit Gold Mine continued long enough
to enable Mr. Paxton to realise his holding, if not at the top
price--that had been touched while he had been fighting for his life
in bed--still for a sum which was large enough to ensure his complete
comfort, so far as pecuniary troubles were concerned, for the rest of
his life. It was his final speculation. The ready money which he
obtained he invested in consols. He lives on the interest, and
protests that nothing will ever again induce him to gamble in stocks
and shares. Since a lady who is largely interested in his movements
has endorsed his promise, it is probable that he will keep his word.
Immediately after the trial Mr. Cyril Paxton and Miss Daisy Strong
were married quietly at a certain church in Brighton; if you find
their names upon its register of marriages you will know which church
it was. In the first flush of his remorse and self-reproach--one
should always remember that "when the devil was ill, the devil a saint
would be"--Mr. Paxton declared that his conduct in connection with the
Datchet diamonds had made him unworthy of an alliance with a decent
woman. When he said this, urged thereto by his new-born humility and
sense of shame, Miss Strong's conduct really was outrageous. She
abused him for calling himself unworthy, asserted that all along she
had known that, when it came to the marrying-point, he meant to jilt
her; and that, since her expectations on that subject were now so
fully realised, to her most desperate undoing, all that there remained
for her to do was to throw herself into the sea from the end of the
pier. She vowed that everything had been her fault, exclaiming that if
she had never fallen away from the high estate which is woman's proper
appanage, so far as to accept of the shelter of Mr. Lawrence's
umbrella in that storm upon the Dyke, but suffered herself to be
drowned and blown to shreds instead, nothing would have happened which
had happened; and that, therefore, all the evil had been wrought by
her. Though she had never thought--never for an instant--that he
would, or could, have been so unforgiving! When she broke into tears,
affirming that, in the face of his hardheartedness, nothing was left
to her but death, he succumbed to this latest example of the beautiful
simplicity of feminine logic, and admitted that he might after all be
a more desirable _parti_ than he had himself supposed.
"You have passed through the cleansing fires," she murmured, when, her
reasoning having prevailed, a reconciliation had ensued. "And you have
issued from them, if possible, truer metal than you went in."
Mr. Paxton felt that that indeed was very possible. He allowed the
compliment to go unheeded--conscious, no doubt, that it was
undeserved.
"God grant that I may never again be led into such temptation!"
That was what he said. We, on our part, may hope that his prayer may
be granted.