“She did love me.  She must have loved me—­else how could her timid nature have taken the risk it did?

“Summer fled by like a flash.  Molly stayed with her friends as long as she could find an excuse and then went on for a brief week in Toronto.  It was the week, of course, that I returned to college.  We hoped that she could extend her stay, but her mother wrote ‘Come home,’ and there was no appeal from that.  Then I did a desperate thing.  Without Molly’s knowledge I wrote to her mother telling her that I loved her daughter and begging, as a man begs for his life, to be allowed to ask her to wait for me.  The letter was a lie in that it concealed the fact that my love was already confessed but I felt it necessary to shield Molly.  I received no answer to the letter, but Molly received a telegram, ’Come home at once.’

“I can leave you to imagine the scene—­my despair, Molly’s tears!  Never for an instant did she dream of disobeying and I—­I felt that if she went I should lose her forever.

“Willits, there is something in me, devil or angel, which will not give up.  Nothing has ever conquered it yet and Molly was like wax in my hands—­so long as ‘Mother’ need not know.  I do not attempt to excuse myself; what I did was dastardly, but it did not seem so then.  The night before she left, she stole away from home.  I had a license and we were married by a Methodist minister.  He knew neither of us and probably forgot the whole incident immediately.  It was a marriage only in name for we said good-bye at Molly’s door.  She left next morning.  I never saw her again.”

Into the silence which followed, the professor’s words dropped dryly.

“What was your idea in forcing a meaningless marriage?”

“I loved her.  I knew that it was the only way.  Madly as I loved her, I knew that Molly was weak as water.  I could not, would not, run the risk of letting her leave me without the legal tie.  But I justified it to myself—­I could have justified anything, I fear!  I vowed a vow that she would be repaid for the waiting as never woman yet was paid.  She wept on my shoulder and said, ’And you really do love me, Harry—­and you’ll swear mother need never know?’

“I swore it.  There were to be no letters.  Molly was too terrified to write and still more terrified of receiving a letter.  She would live in constant dread, she said, if there were a possibility of such a thing.  Weak in everything else she was adamant in this.

“I went back to work.  I worked with the strength of ten.  Health, comfort, pleasure, all were subordinated to the fever of work.  I hoped that I might steal a glimpse of her sometimes.  She promised to try to return to Toronto.  But my letter must have alarmed the mother.  I found out, indirectly, that shortly after her return, Mrs. Weston whisked her off to Europe.  They were gone a year.  When they returned I was in the far west with a government surveying party, earning something to help me with my last year’s college expenses.  When I was again in Toronto she had vanished.  Gone, as I afterward learned, to stay with an aunt in California.  Her mother, alive to danger, was not going to risk a meeting, and my vow to Molly left me helpless.  But how I worked!