Page:Achmed Abdullah--Wings.djvu/119

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RENUNCIATION

When she came to him that night, forty-eight hours before he sailed for France with his battalion, she did so of her own free will.

For he had not seen her; he had not written to her; he had even tried not to think of her since that shimmering, pink-and-lavender noon of early June, two years earlier, when, in rose point lace and orange-blossoms, she had walked up the aisle of St. Thomas's Church and had become the wife of Dan Coolidge.

Her low, trembling "I will!" had sounded the death-knell of Roger Kenyon's tempestuous youth. He had plucked her from his heart, had uprooted her from his mind, from his smoldering, subconscious passion had cast the memory of her pale, pure oval of a face to the limbo of visions that must be forgotten.

It seemed strange that he could do so; for Roger had always been a hot-blooded, virile, inconsiderate