Unless he dies, and his money-power
ends, he will make of this great land nothing more than a shell out of
which he and his kind have taken all the meat. And the hour of deadliest
danger is now upon us."
He looked at Mary Standish, and it was as if death had come to her where
she sat. She seemed not to breathe, and her face was so white it
frightened him. And then, slowly, she turned her eyes upon him, and
never had he seen such living pools of torture and of horror. He was
amazed at the quietness of her voice when she began to speak, and
startled by the almost deadly coldness of it.
"I think you can understand--now--why I leaped into the sea, why I
wanted the world to think I was dead, and why I have feared to tell you
the truth," she said. "_I am John Graham's wife._"
CHAPTER XIX
Alan's first thought was of the monstrous incongruity of the thing, the
almost physical impossibility of a mesalliance of the sort Mary Standish
had revealed to him. He saw her, young and beautiful, with face and eyes
that from the beginning had made him feel all that was good and sweet in
life, and behind her he saw the shadow-hulk of John Graham, the pitiless
iron-man, without conscience and without soul, coarsened by power,
fiendish in his iniquities, and old enough to be her father!
A slow smile twisted his lips, but he did not know he smiled.
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