Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1916)

120 Photoplay Magazine "I'll tell you what she's doing here." He took a step forward and met Temple's gaze with the hot light of his own. ''She came here to see me; to try and tell me some reason why she shouldn't break her engagement to you." The shock of the words was terrific. Paul seemed to recoil, though he did not move, and for a moment he looked dazed. "Break her engagement!" he repeated, stupidly. "Yes!" Paul pulled himself together and turned to June. "This isn't true, June ! This man's lying!" he said, almost in a tone of confidence. "I came to say I wouldn't break my engagement to you," she replied. "Yes," snapped Holt, "but only because her sense of duty keeps her bound to you — not her feelings. I'm glad you've come, Temple ! There's nobody I'd sooner see right now than you. June and I've been thrashing this thing back and forth till I'm sick of it, and I'm going to have it settled one way or another here and now — tonight." "You needn't worry," Paul assured him, "it'll be settled." The men were bristling with animosity like two dogs. "Now I want to know what you mean by saying only June's sense of duty keeps her bound to me." "I mean just that. She doesn't love you as she did when you went back East. She admitted it to me yesterday, and she has admitted it again tonight. More than that, she doesn't deny that she loves me. Yet she won't break her engagement just because she gave her word to you once, before she knew enough of the world or of men to give her word rightfully to anybody." "That side of it is none of your damned business." Holt shrugged, with a deprecating motion, as much as to say, "That's a matter of opinion." Temple was white, not only with anger but with distress. He had never pictured such a situation as this. The whole of the beautiful structure that he had been living in and adding to for months was crashing and tumbling about him. Could it be that at the threshold of the happiness he had so hardly won, fate and life were to trick him again? A thousand disbeliefs and questions regarding June, as torturing as they were inevitable, surged through his mind, but he knew he could not go into that phase now. The present situation must be met first. And he must go to June for confirmation of her own defection! He turned to her. She had sunk into the chair nearest the desk, and resting her elbows on its arm had buried her face in her hands. "Is it true," he asked, and hesitated, "what this man says?" "I suppose so," she said, pitifully, "things are — are different — since you went away." Somehow, though she spoke the truth, she felt that the words placed her unjustly in the wrong, after all her struggle to do the right and honorable thing. And yet she was helpless between the strong passions of these two men and without power or means of making them see. Life, which has no mercy toward intentions and judges only by facts, could only place the extreme interpretation on her words. She might as well have told Temple the worst, for he felt that it had occurred. His face grew pinched. "Of course you love June?" he said to Holt. "Of course!" angrily. Suddenly the bitter cruelty and unfairness of it all rushed over Paul. "'Well, what right have you got to love her?" he demanded, hoarsely. "What right did you have to try and make her love you? You knew from the first that she was engaged to me !" A murderous impulse to take matters into his own hands, to wreak a physical revenge upon Holt, surged through him. "I did know it, yes. But if she made a mistake, hasn't she a right to break that engagement? I tell you she had no right to be engaged to you, knowing as little as she did when she came here." "And I tell you you had no right to make love to her if she was engaged to the man in the moon! Because she was alone and strange was all the more reason why you should have protected her ! Instead of that you took advantage of her." "What's the use of your talking like that?" Holt's face was mottled with heat. "It doesn't alter the facts, does it? It doesn't alter the fact that things are