d--now--why I leaped into the sea, why I
wanted the world to think I was dead, and why I have feared to tell you
the truth," she said. "_I am John Graham's wife._"

CHAPTER XIX

Alan's first thought was of the monstrous incongruity of the thing, the
almost physical impossibility of a mesalliance of the sort Mary Standish
had revealed to him. He saw her, young and beautiful, with face and eyes
that from the beginning had made him feel all that was good and sweet in
life, and behind her he saw the shadow-hulk of John Graham, the pitiless
iron-man, without conscience and without soul, coarsened by power,
fiendish in his iniquities, and old enough to be her father!

A slow smile twisted his lips, but he did not know he smiled. He pulled
himself together without letting her see the physical part of the effort
it was taking. And he tried to find something to say that would help
clear her eyes of the agony that was in them.

"That--is a most unreasonable thing--to be true," he said.

It seemed to him his lips were making words out of wood, and that the
words were fatuously inefficient compared with what he should have said,
or acted, under the circumstances.

She nodded. "It is. But the world doesn't look at it in that way. Such
things just happen."

She reached for a book which lay on the table where the tundra daisies
were heaped. It was a book written around the early phases of pioneer
life in Alaska, taken from his own library, a volume of statistical
worth, dryly but carefully written--and she had been reading it. It
struck him as a symbol of the fight she was making, of her courage, and
of her desire to triumph in the face of tremendous odds that must have
beset her. He still could not associate her completely with John Graham.
Yet his face was cold and white.

Her hand trembled a little as she opened the book and took from it a
newspaper clipping. She did not speak as she unfolded it and gave it
to him.

At the top of two printed columns was the picture of a young
and beautiful girl; in an oval, covering a small space over the
girl's shoulder, was a picture of a man of fifty or so. Both were
strangers to him. He read their names, and then the headlines. "A
Hundred-Million-Dollar Love" was the caption, and after the word love
was a dollar sign. Youth and age, beauty and the other thing, two great
fortunes united. He caught the idea and looked at Mary Standish. It was
impossible for him to think of her as M