pledged yourself; we're betrothed, you and I, Marjorie; and nothing I've done entitles you to end it. Nothing! And nothing you've done can cause me to let you go. You'd be my wife now, probably, and happy and not thinking of anything else, if your father—oh, I can't talk about him; I mean, it's been all external to you and me, the trouble between us; it's what he did that drove you away; but now I've got you back."
There in the car she did not oppose him; she dared not while they were driving; so he took her to Clearedge Street and to Jen Cordeen's, thereby keeping his promise, and there he saw for himself and learned from her how she had been living. Then he tried to take her away.
His idea was not to return her to her father or to her home; for her home, as he told her, was occupied only by the servants; her father was living, most of the time, at a club; the plan, as Billy proclaimed it to her, was to take her at once either to the Sedgwicks' in Evanston or, if she preferred not going to a friend of hers, to the home of friends of his on Bellevue Place in Chicago. He would wire immediately for his own mother, who undoubtedly would come down at once from Bay City and either take Marjorie home with her or stay with her in Chicago until Marjorie became more quiet and normal.
"Normal!" The word stuck in Marjorie's mind when at last, after creating about all the commotion possible, short of calling the police, Billy was gone. What a man like Billy meant by "normal" for a girl was being happy as his wife and not thinking of anything but compliance with his ideas and commands. Oh, high, moral ideas—ideals, indeed (that was the
