Within the Law [63]
"And you love me now!" he went on insistingly.
"No, no!" Mary's denial came like a cry for escape.
"You love me now!" There was a masterful quality in his declaration, which seemed to ignore her negation.
"I don't," she repeated bitterly.
But he was inexorable.
"Look me in the face, and say that."
He took her face in his hands, lifted it, and his eyes met hers searchingly.
"Look me in the face, and say that," he repeated.
There was a silence that seemed long, though it was measured in the passing of seconds. The three watchers dared not interrupt this drama of emotions, but, at last, Mary, who had planned so long for this hour, gathered her forces and spoke valiantly. Her voice was low, but without any weakness of doubt.
"I do not love you."
In the instant of reply, Dick Gilder, by some inspiration of love, changed his attitude. "Just the same," he said cheerfully, "you are my wife, and I'm going to keep you and make you love me."
Mary felt a thrill of fear through her very soul.
"You can't!" she cried harshly. "You are his son!"
"She's a crook!" Burke said.
"I don't care a damn what you've been!" Dick exclaimed. "From now on you'll go straight. You'll walk the straightest line a woman ever walked. You'll put all thoughts of vengeance out of your heart, because I'll fill it with something bigger--I'm going to make you love me."
Burke, with his rousing voice, spoke again:
"I tell you, she's a crook!"
Mary moved a little, and then turned her face toward Gilder.
"And, if I am, who made me one? You can't send a girl to prison, and have her come out anything else."
Burke swung himself around in a movement of complete disgust.
"She didn't get her time for good behavior."
Mary raised her head, haughtily, with a gesture of high disdain.
"And I'm proud of it!" came her instant retort. "Do you know what goes on there behind those stone walls? Do you, Mr. District Attorney, whose business it is to send girls there? Do you know what a girl is expected to do, to get time off for good behavior? If you don't, ask the keepers."
Gilder moved fussily.
"And you----"
Mary swayed a little, standing there before her questioner.
"I served every minute of my time--every minute of it, three full, whole years. Do you wonder that I want to get even, that some one has got to pay? Four years ago, you took away my name--and gave me a number.... Now, I've given up the number--and I've got your name."
CHAPTER XV. AFTERMATH OF TRAGEDY.
The Gilders, both father and son, endured much suffering throughout the night and day that followed the scene in Mary Turner's apartment, when she had made known the accomplishment of her revenge on the older man by her ensnaring of the younger. Dick had followed the others out of her presence at her command, emphasized by her leaving him alone when he would have pleaded further with her. Since then, he had striven to obtain another interview with his bride, but she had refused him. He was denied admission to the apartment. Only the maid answered the ringing of the telephone, and his notes were seemingly unheeded. Distraught by this violent interjection of torment into a life that hitherto had known no important suffering, Dick Gilder showed what mettle of man lay beneath his debonair appearance. And that mettle was of a kind worth while. In these hours of grief, the soul of him put out its strength. He learned beyond peradventure of doubt that the woman whom he had married was in truth an ex-convict, even as Burke and Demarest had declared. Nevertheless, he did not for an instant believe that she was guilty of the crime with which she had been originally charged and for which she had served a sentence in prison. For the rest, he could understand in some degree how the venom of the wrong inflicted on her had poisoned her nature through the years, till she had worked out its evil through the scheme of which he was the innocent victim. He cared little for the fact that recently she had devoted herself to devious