My Dearest Love by Emilie Loring

Author:Emilie Loring [Loring, Emilie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2019-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

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Rose heard Craven’s oath of anger before she started to run along the path. Once she caught her foot in a root and crashed to the ground. Almost stunned by the force of her fall, she struggled up and ran on. When she reached the lighted street she instinctively pulled her hat into place and walked slowly. Her breath still came in gasps. She tried to control it, stopping to look into shop windows, hoping that the slower pace would quiet her pounding heart. She looked furtively over her shoulder. Craven was not in sight. He would never venture to follow her where he might be seen and recognized.

Where had she found the courage to burst the shackles which held her? He had been surprised by her cry of defiance, of liberation, but no more than she herself had been. Somewhere she had acquired the strength to face the punishment which he would inevitably mete out. Thank God, she had found it. There could be no turning back now.

But before making her break for freedom she had, as a price of her own freedom, performed one more act of dishonor. She had told him that the formula was in the Bradford safe. True, she had not divulged the combination, which she had found carelessly lying in Christopher Bradford’s unlocked desk drawer. But she had no illusion. Craven would be clever enough to open that safe in one way or another, even if he had to take the terrible risk of blowing it up.

She walked on slowly and was caught in a little crowd of people who were waiting to buy tickets for a movie. She allowed herself passively to be engulfed by it and swept along to the ticket window. Perhaps the picture would help her to forget her problems for a while. When her mind was rested she could decide what to do.

But her own thoughts dominated. Seated in the dark theater she stared unseeingly at the film. She lived over again her acquaintance with Craven. Her first position in New York had been that of cashier and stenographer in a brokerage office. The firm was not of the highest type — she had become aware of that shortly after she had started to work — but her funds were too low to admit of fastidiousness. Gradually, she had become callous to the business methods which in the beginning had shocked her.

Craven had seemed to be a sort of silent partner in the concern. Any business in which he was interested was always conducted behind closed doors; he never appeared in the open. Rose knew that he and the two other men had blown several get-rich-while-you-wait bubbles, which had been alluringly iridescent and unbelievably profitable while they floated. Of course, they had followed the law of bubbles and collapsed, but not until after the inflaters had wafted them into other hands.

The girl had been thrilled by the Aladdin-and-the-wonderful-lamp tales of fortunes piled up in one deal, of expensive cars purchased from the profits of one day’s juggling.

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