“Do you mean that?” he repeated, stern and sharp, yet sad, wistfully sad, too.

“I don’t know what I mean,” she cried, desperately afraid of him, afraid of the visions the idea of not marrying him conjured.  “I don’t know what I mean,” she repeated.  “You fill me with a kind of—­of—­horror.  You draw me into your grasp in spite of myself—­ like a whirlpool—­and rouse all my instinct to try and save myself.  Sometimes that desire becomes a positive frenzy.”

He laughed complacently.  “That is love,” said he.

She did not resent his tone or dispute his verdict externally.  “If it is love,” replied she evenly, “then never did love wear so strange, so dreadful a disguise.”

He laid his talon-hand, hardened and misshapen by manual labor, but if ugly, then ugly with the majesty of the twisted, tempest-defying oak, over hers.  “Believe me, Margaret, you love me.  You have loved me all along....And I you.”

“Don’t deceive yourself,” she felt bound to say, “I certainly do not love you if love has any of its generally accepted meanings.”

“I am not the general sort of person,” said he.  “It is not strange that I should arouse extraordinary feelings, is it?  Driver”—­he had the trap in the roof up and was thrusting through it a slip of paper—­“take us to that street and number.”

She gasped with a tightening at the heart.  “I must return to the hotel at once,” she said hurriedly.

He fixed his gaze upon her.  “We are going to the preacher’s,” said he.

“The preacher’s?” she murmured, shrinking in terror.

“Grant is waiting for us there”—­he glanced at his watch—­“or, rather, will be there in about ten minutes.  We are a little earlier than I anticipated.”

She flushed crimson, paled, felt she would certainly suffocate with rage.

“Before you speak,” continued he, “listen to me.  You don’t want to go back into that torment of doubt in which we’ve both been hopping about for a month, like a pair of damned souls being used as tennis balls by fiends.  Let’s settle the business now, and for good and all.  Let us have peace—­for God’s sake, peace!  I know you’ve been miserable.  I know I’ve been on the rack.  And it’s got to stop.  Am I not right?”

She leaned back in her corner of the cab, shut her eyes, said no more—­and all but ceased to think.  What was there to say?  What was there to think?  When Fate ceases to tolerate our pleasant delusion of free will, when it openly and firmly seizes us and hurries us along, we do not discuss or comment.  We close our minds, relax and submit.

At the parsonage he sprang out, stood by to help her descend, half-dragged her from the cab when she hesitated.  He shouted at the driver:  “How much do I owe you, friend?”

“Six dollars, sir.”

“Not on your life!” shouted Craig furiously.  He turned to Margaret, standing beside him in a daze.  “What do you think of that!  This fellow imagines because I’ve got a well-dressed woman along I’ll submit.  But I’m not that big a snob.”  He was looking up at the cabman again.  “You miserable thief!” he exclaimed.  “I’ll give you three dollars, and that’s too much by a dollar.”