Mary Roberts Rinehart

“ He bent over, shaken and pale, and kissed the palm of her hand.
"It is you who are good," he said huskily. "I, who talked smugly of virtue and tenderness and pity, and who let you go out of my life—I care for you more than I care for anything in this world. I want you—I want you."
Elinor's eyes turned toward the high altar with its cross. Always, when she looked at it, she had seen the cross at Saint Jude's, and the dawn, and sparrows drinking out of the wet gutter at her feet.
"I want you," said Ward, and waited, frightened. ”

“ Ward lay back on his pillows and listened to the age-old arguments.
Ho it was on such literature as this that Elinor had been reared! How fair a plant to have grown thus in the dark! And as the nurse droned on, Ward came to realize how natural and how inevitable had been her development. Reared in such soil, what might he himself not have become; and more than that, would he have been one-half so sweet, to tender, so—good?
Toward dawn the nurse slept in her chair. Her cap had fallen a little crooked, and the beautifying hand of sleep had touched away the small furrows between her eyes. ”

“ Even if he cares for you, you cannot marry him. If he ever found out about you—"
"He will never marry me. And—he does know."
The fact that Ward knew the truth about Elinor and the band brought back to him their common peril. He thrust aside, for the time at least, his passion and his despair; and calmly directed his energies toward preparing the house for the inevitable search.
So systematic had old Hilary been that there were few papers to destroy. Such of the ledgers as were incriminating he burned in the furnace. Elinor's box of jewels he carried upstairs and placed on the library table. ”