But while Boone waited for Anne to come into the ring he made no assiduous search for her in the boxes, because, like many other men whose outward seeming is one of boldness, he was fettered by an inordinate shyness in this heavy atmosphere of the unaccustomed. Later Anne accused him of snubbing her. "You passed right by me a half dozen times," she teased with violet mischief shimmering in her eyes. "You wouldn't even look at me."
"I was plain scared," he made candid admission; "but when you went into the ring I looked at you every minute."
"You're jolly well right you did," she laughed. "You were glued to the rail, tramping down women and small children. Every time I came round I saw you there and your face haunted me like a spirit in purgatory. Your eyes were positively bulging with terror."
"That's what you get," Boone retorted calmly, "for making a chicken-hearted fellow fall in love with you. I had to hang 'round and wait. I could no more pursue you through the roses and diamonds than a cat could follow you into water."
The girl shook her head with a bewildered indulgence. "I can't understand it," she protested. "There is nothing to be frightened about."
The young mountaineer grinned sheepishly. "I reckon a lion-tamer would say the same thing," he asserted, "about going into the cage. He's used to it."
Anne sat silent for a few moments, and between her eyes came a tiny pucker, as if a thought tinged with pain had pricked, thornlike, into her reflections.
At last she spoke slowly: "Suppose you couldn't swim, and I had to spend a lot of time in deep water. Wouldn't you learn?"
"That's different," he assured her. "You might need me in that event."
"You say society frightens you, and it's a thing I can't understand. I could understand its boring you. It bores me. I love informal things. I love my friends and the door that stands open as it always does here, but I hate the dress parades. There's some sense in the Horse Show. It makes a market for expensively bred and trained animals, and it's a sort of fancy advertising; but I don't care for a human application of the same idea."
"I feel that way, too," he responded quickly, "and not being expensively bred or trained, I can't escape feeling like a cart horse would feel in that ring."
"I'm going to make my début, Boone," she said quietly. "I'm going to do it because both mother and Uncle Tom have their hearts set on it and there's no graciousness in stubborn resistance. There are times coming when I've got to stand out against them, and I don't want to multiply them needlessly. But there's something more than just ordinary dislike back of my feeling as I do about it all, and I think it's a thing you'd be the first to understand."
"I guess I ought to understand, Anne, but I've got so much to learn. Please make allowances for me and explain." His tone was humble and self-accusing.
"This début ball is just their way of putting me on the marriage market—duly labelled and proclaimed. I don't fancy being put up at auction, and it doesn't even seem quite honest. It's not a genuine offer of sale, because it's all fixed in their own minds. Morgan is to bid me in when the time comes."
Boone's face grew sombre, and his strong mouth line stiffened over his resolute chin.
"God knows that arrangement is going to come to grief," he said in a low voice that shook with feeling.
"Not if Lochinvar doesn't come to the party," she retorted with a swift change to the riffle of laughing eyes. "I'm letting sleeping dogs lie for the present, Boone, because it's the best way. There isn't any doubt of you in my heart. You know that, but it will be a long time before you can marry me. Meantime,—" the battle light shone for a flashing instant in her pupils—"I'm standing out for one thing. They've got to give you full acknowledgment. Everybody that accepts me must accept you—and unless you claim recognition, they won't do it."
Boone rose and came over. He took her hands in his own and looked down at her, and, though he smiled, his voice was full of worship.
"Lochinvar will come, dearest," he declared. "He'll come in full war-paint, and nobody but himself will know how stiff he's scared."
It was the morning after that that Boone sat again as a defendant in the police court, flanked by Morgan and the Colonel. He was on trial for shooting and wounding, and there had been broadly circulated hints that his prosecution would be gruelling enough to dissuade bold and adverse spirits on election day. Yet when the case was reached on the docket, Henry Simpson, whose finger was in every pie as a master pastry cook for the intrenched element, arose from his place at the right hand of the court's prosecutor and sonorously cleared his throat.
"May it please your Honour," he announced, with the rhetorical dignity of a Roman senator—or a criminal lawyer's idea of a Roman senator—"the prosecuting witness harbours no feeling of rancour in this affair, despite the injuries which he sustained. The defendant seems to have been led astray in the hot enthusiasm of his youth by older heads. Having no wish to punish a cat's-paw for the responsibility of his mentors, we move the dismissal of the accused."
"And we, your Honour," came the uptake of Morgan Wallifarro so swiftly as to leave no margin of pause between statement and retort, "insist upon a trial and a full vindication. This prosecuting witness who would now spread the benign mantle of charity over the conduct of his assailant, fell face foremost while leading an armed raid on a registration booth. I am prepared to prove that the wounded man who now sits there, an exemplar of Christian forgiveness, was spirited away, after his gang fled, and cared for in a private room at the City Hospital under the tender auspices of certain officials. I am further prepared to prove that the name which this municipal favourite now wears is, for him, a new one and that until recently he was known as Kid Repetto whose likeness and Bertillon measurements are preserved in the local rogues' gallery. The profession which he ornamented until the city hall cried out for his skilled aid was burglary and second-story work—"
The judicial gavel fell with an admonitory slam, and the magisterial jaws came warningly together.
"Mr. Wallifarro," declared the judge, "the court sustains the prosecution's motion of dismissal. Your unproven statements are highly improper in their innuendo of collusion by an officer of this court. You are seeking to try this case in the newspapers, sir," and Morgan, closing his portfolio, smiled his mocking admission of the charge. He had watched the busy pencils at the press table, and knew that some of them would blossom in flaring headlines. He had seen the cartoonist who had come to make a pencil sketch of Boone himself finish his task, and he enjoyed the judge's resentment. Now he turned away with the irritating jauntiness of one who has scored.
But that evening, at the Horse Show, Boone suffered the embarrassment of that flare-up of publicity which he felt was purely adventitious. Chance had made him a scrap in a pattern of ephemeral interest, and to him it seemed that one man in three carried an afternoon paper in his pocket with his own hasty albeit recognizable portrait starkly displayed to the public gaze. On faces which he did not know he caught smiles of amused recognition, and on one which he did know a glower of hate. That was the face of the policeman who had arrested him.
Some of the women in the boxes had him dragged before them for introduction, and he responded with a shyness that was cloaked under the reserve of his half-barbaric dignity.
Anne smiled, and a proprietary pride lurked in her expression.
"Anne looks as docile and amiable as a sweet child," sighed Mrs. Masters to Colonel Wallifarro, as he bade her good night that same evening, "but she's got Larry's British stubbornness in every fibre."
"Added," suggested the Colonel with a truant twinkle, "to the admirable resoluteness of our own family."
"She's absolutely set on having this young protégé of yours at her début ball, and I suppose you know what that signifies. It means that through her whole social career he'll be dangling along frightening off really eligible men!" The lady gave a well-bred little snort of disdain. "He's about as possible as a pet toad!"
The Colonel laughed.
"I'm afraid, my dear, that I like Anne the better for it. We've agreed that Morgan is your choice, and mine—and I don't think Morgan is going to be scared off. Besides, this young man is in my office."
"So is your office cat—if you have one," sniffed the anxious mother. "We're not sending the cat an invitation, you know."
"I have no cat," observed the lawyer with perfect gravity, and Mrs. Masters shrugged her shoulders with unconvinced resignation.
When the telephone on Boone's desk rang one afternoon he was quite alone there, and he took up the receiver, to hear Anne's voice. The conversation at first indicated no definite objective, but after a little the girl demanded:
"Boone, youarecoming to my party—aren't you?"
For a moment the young man hung hesitantly on the question; then he said: "Anne, I'd go anywhere for the chance of seeing you, but you know 'I hain't nuver run a set in my life. My folks they don't hold hit ter be godly.'"
Her laughter tinkled back to him, but he had caught the underlying insistence of her tone, and he remembered what she had said about this ball: what it meant to her, and what his being there meant too.
"Take young Lochinvar for instance," he went on banteringly yet with a dubious touch in his voice. "It wasn't the first party of the season that he came to, was it? And even at the finish he was a little late. Maybe there was some delay in getting his coat of mail ready."
"Oh," the girl's exclamation was one of quick understanding. She knew something of Boone's financial pinch, and how he felt it a point of honour to stretch as far as possible the fund his patron had left him. "You mean—" she broke off, and the young mountaineer spoke bluntly,
"I mean I haven't a dress suit, and short of stealing one—"
"I understand," she declared, and began talking animatedly of other things, but when she had rung off Boone sat staring at an open law book and making nothing of its text. Then he heard a movement at his back and swung around in his swivel chair, but the next instant he was on his feet with an exclamation that was an outburst of joy.
There, standing just inside the door, tanned like saddle leather, somewhat grayer about the temples and sparer of figure than of old, but with the strong vigour of active months, stood Victor McCalloway.
"I think, my boy," he said, as though he had never been away at all, "we can run to a dress suit."
A moment later the two men stood with their hands clasped, and the face of the younger was aglow with such delight as can come only from a happy windfall out of the unexpected.
Never had that other face and figure been far from his thoughts. Never had his ardent hero-worship waned or tarnished. His speculations and dreams had been haunted by misgivings bred of the fierce chances of war, chances which might make of the features, into which he now looked again, only a memory.
New and varied activities in his life had bulwarked him against actual brooding, and youth is too brightly hopeful to accept grim possibilities, unproven; but the mists of denied fear had hung undissolved, and there had been moments when they had thickened and congealed on the crystal of his thoughts to dark foreboding.
He had not known with what name or rank his beloved preceptor had been serving over there beyond the Pacific. Many officers had fallen, and McCalloway was not one to turn half aside from any danger. If he had been among the lost, Boone might never have known. Even his torture of mind over Asa had been free of this intolerable character of suspense. Now it was lifted, and without a forerunner of hint the man stood there before him in the flesh, smiling and talking of a dress suit!
"I can't believe it, sir," Boone stammered, and McCalloway's ruddy face became quizzical.
"Had you made up your mind to lose me, then?" he inquired.
Much they had in common at that moment of reunion, and one thing in antithesis. Boone thought of his lost race and was smitten with a pang of failure to report, but McCalloway was reading the clarity of bold and honest eyes: of a face to which it was given to wear the karat-mark of dauntlessness and integrity, and at the end of his gaze he gave an unuttered summary of what he had read: "Clean as a hound's tooth—and as strong."
"They beat me to a pulp down there, sir," Boone made prompt and rueful confession, "but there's time to tell about that later. I guess for a while I'm going to keep you busy declining to answer questions about yourself."
"There may be some uncensored passages," smiled the Scot. "I sha'n't have to walk in total darkness."
"The important question is already answered, sir. You are safely back. You were with Kuroki, weren't you?" There Boone halted and grinned as he added: "'Don't answer that thar question onlessen ye've a mind ter.'"
"I was with him for a time. Why do you ask?"
"Because," came the instant and confident response, "where he went there were the signs of genius."
"Genius went with Kuroki quite independently of his subordinates," McCalloway assured him gravely, "but a few moments back I heard you tell some one over the telephone that you couldn't come to her party because you had no evening clothes. The Russian war is over, but the matter of that dress suit retains the force of present crisis."
A half hour later, while the elder man displayed a sartorial knowledge which surprised him, Boone was being measured for his first evening clothes.
"For the Lord's sake, sir," he besought with sudden realization as they left the tailor's shop, "don't ever breathe a word about that spade-tail coat back there in Marlin. I'm going to run for the legislature next time, you know. The man that licked me before had patches on his pants."
McCalloway nodded his head. "I'll tell it not in Gath, speak it not in Ascalon," he promised. "That suit of clothes might prove your political shroud."
Boone saw Anne that evening and with a thrilling voice told her of McCalloway's return—but of the visit to the tailor he said nothing, and she refrained from reverting to the topic of the party.
Anne was sensitive on the point of an invitation urgently given and not eagerly accepted. That is what her consciousness registered, and she told herself that it was petulant and unworthy to attach so much importance to a minor disappointment. But without full realization, other and graver thought elements hung with ponderous weight from the peg of that lesser circumstance. Boone's inability to buy a dress suit was a measure of his poverty and of the great undertaking which lay ahead of him; of the length and steepness of the road he must travel before he could come to her and say, "I have made a home for you."
She herself was to be presented to society with expensive display, and her pride shivered fastidiously at the realization that all this outlay came from a purse not their own, and entailed an undeclared obligation. She had never been told just how far she and her mother depended on the Colonel's bounty. That had been carefully left enveloped in a hazy indefiniteness that revealed no sharp or embarrassing angle of detail. Had she known it all, her shiver of distaste would have been a shudder of chagrin. But Anne was enough in love with Boone to feel that by his absence from her social launching the sparkle of her little personal triumph would be dulled.
But when at last she stood in her receiving line, radiant in her young loveliness, she glanced up and her violet eyes took on a sudden sparkle, while her cheeks flushed with surprised pleasure, for there, making his way through the door, came Boone.
He came with his stage fright as invisible as the secrets of Bluebeard's closet, so that even Mrs. Masters, looking up with equal surprise though not an equal delight, admitted that in appearance, at least, he was no liability to her company of guests.
The clothes that Victor McCalloway had supervised were tailored as they should have been, with every requisite of conservative elegance, and they set off a figure of a man well sculptured of line and proportion.
As he took Anne's hand he said in a lowered voice and with a twinkle in his eyes, "I came in through the front door—but there wasn't any arch. My legs are shaking."
Anne glanced down. "They are doing it very quietly," she reassured. "No fuss at all."
Because of a straight-eyed sincerity and a candid vigour which endowed him with a forcefulness beyond his years, and because a certain deliberate humour played in his eyes and flashed occasionally into his ungarrulous speech, he found himself smiled upon with the tolerant approval of the older ladies and the point-blank delight of the younger.
Back at his desk the next morning he was again the grave-eyed and industrious young utility man, but in his breast pocket was a crumpled rosebud which to him still had fragrant life. In his mind were certain rich memories and in his veins raced hot currents of love—pitched to a new exhilaration.
Victor McCalloway had become again the lone man of the mountains, and Boone burned with anxiety to go to him there, but the soldier had prohibited that just now. The boy had put his hand to the plough of a virulent city campaign, and until the furrow was turned he must stay there with the men who were making the fight.
"For you, my boy," he had declared, with a live interest that ran to emphasis, "this is an opportunity not to be missed. It is a phase of transition, not only in your own development but in that of your State and your country. Through all of it sounds the insistent message of the future: whoever takes into his hands public affairs must give to the public a conscientious accounting. This is a declaration of war on the old, slothfully accepted dogma that to the victor belongs the spoils. It is Humanity's plea for a place in government."
When McCalloway had gone, Boone carried into the steps and developments of that autumn's activities a freshly galvanized sense of romance and of high adventure. Through the labour of each day thrilled the thought of Anne, and the quiet triumph of being no longer "poor white trash."
In the forces of the political enemy clinging doggedly to the spoils of long possession and sticking at no desperate effort, the boy discovered much that was not mean—rather was it picturesque with a sort of Robin Hood flavour and the drama of a passing order. Here were the twentieth-century counterparts of the gentlemen-gamblers of the old Mississippi steamboat days, a gentry bold and mendacious, unable to perceive that what had been must not for that reason continue to be.
Often Boone went to hear Morgan delivering his philippics to street corner audiences, and often too he dropped around inconspicuously to listen as that administration orator popularly called "The Bull" exhorted "the pure in heart." He liked the extremes between the edged satire and nervous force of the young lawyer whose dress and appearance was always point-device, and whose message was always "Carthago delenda est," and the great sonorous voice of the rougher man who knew the hearts of the mob and how to reach them.
At the end of a white-hot campaign came an election day that eclipsed in violence the period of registration, and out of its confusion emerged, as bruised victors, the forces of the city hall.
But the town was aflame, and the call ran to clamour for a contest in court. Lawyers volunteered their services without charge, citizens attended mass meetings to pledge financial support, and the lines drew for fresh battles. In the interval between events Boone doffed his city clothing and donned again the corduroys and flannel shirt of the hills that were now viscid with winter mud and patched with snow between the gray starkness of the timber. He had gone back to the house of Victor McCalloway. There, while the hearth roared, they sat long of evenings, the young man delighting in the narratives of his elder and glowing with the confidence reposed in him—and the older with a quiet light of satisfaction in his eyes, born of seeing the rugged cub that he had taken to his heart developing into a man of whom he was not ashamed.
"How far, my boy," inquired McCalloway on one of these occasions, when the pipe-smoke wreathed up like altar fires of comradeship, "do you feel you've progressed along the trend of development that your young country has followed?"
Boone shook a self-deprecating head. "I should say, sir, that I've about caught up with the Mexican War."
After a long study of the pictures which fantastically shaped and refashioned themselves in the glowing embers, the veteran went reflectively on again:
"Since coming back this time, I've felt it more than ever like a prophet's dream. Great transitions lie ahead of us—in your own time. You will live to see the day when men in this country will no longer talk of this as a land separated by oceans from the eastern hemisphere; as a land that can continue to live its own untrammelled life. A man, like myself for instance, may be a hermit, but a great nation cannot—and I still feel that when that message of merging and common cause comes, it will come not on the wings of the peace dove but belched from the mouths of guns—riding the gales of war."
Boone Wellver walked into the office of the police chief one spring morning when the trees along the streets were youthfully green. Somewhere outside a band, parading with transparencies, was summoning all horse-lovers and devotees of chance to the track and paddocks of Churchill Downs.
Inside the office of the chief sat Morgan Wallifarro, point-device as ever, and over his desk the chief bent, listening with an attitude of deference to what he said. It was a new department head who occupied that swivel chair. New officials occupied every office under that clock-towered roof, and behind each placarded door the suggestions of Morgan Wallifarro held some degree of authoritative force and sanction.
For almost two years the courts had laboured to the grind of the contest cases. Again, shoulder to shoulder with the Nestors of the bar and their younger assistants, Boone had played his minor but far from trivial part. Almost a year before he had listened in the joint sessions room as the decisive utterances of the two chancellors fell upon a taut and expectant stillness. Those arbiters had read long and learned disquisitions as befitted the final chapter to months of hearings. That day had been a Waterloo for attempted Reform. With dignity of manner and legalistic verbiage Boone had heard it adjudged that behind the physical results of the elections the interference of the courts might not penetrate, and he had turned away disheartened but not surprised.
Then had come a new beginning; the final issue in the Court of Appeals, and finally out of that ultimate mill had been ground a reversal and a decision that upon a government seated by such devious and fraudulent methods the cloak of responsibility rested "like the mantle of a giant upon the withered shoulders of a pigmy."
Now as Boone shook hands with the new chief, a patrolman entered the place and stood silently on the threshold. In his eyes was the sullen but unaggressive resentment of the whipped bully. This was the officer who had brandished a club over Morgan Wallifarro's head and who had dragged Boone out of the registration booth under arrest. Gone now was his domineering truculence, gone all but the smouldering of his old, self-confident ferocity. Morgan glanced up without comment, and the chief recognized the new arrival with a curt nod.
"Keefe," he said shortly, "you were under grave charges and failed to appear before the Board of Safety at the designated time."
The uniformed man glowered around the room. One vestige of satisfaction remained to him; that of a truculent exit and of it he meant to avail himself.
"What the hell was the use, Chief. I knew they'd railroad me. I quit right now."
"It's too late. You can't quit!" The words were sharp and incisive, and under the chief's forefinger an electric buzzer rasped. As an orderly appeared, his direction was snapped out: "Call in the lieutenants and captains from the officers' room."
Keefe took a step forward as if in protest, then realizing his helplessness, he halted and stood on braced legs, breathing heavily.
He foresaw what was coming, yet there was no escape, for the hour had struck. He listened stolidly to the ticking clock until several officers in shoulder straps trooped in and lined up, also waiting, then his superior's voice again sounded:
"Keefe, your club!"
The officer laid it on the desk.
"Your revolver." The weapon followed the night-stick. Then the chief rose from his seat.
"You have failed to meet the charges preferred against you. You have used the city's uniform as a protection for law-breaking and violence. Now in the presence of these officers I publicly break you." He ripped the shield from the patrolman's breast and the disgraced man stood a moment unsteadily—almost rocking on his feet as his lips stirred without articulate sound. Then he turned away. His lowering eyes fell upon Morgan Wallifarro, who sat without a word or a change of expression in his chair against the wainscoted wall. For an instant the patrolman seemed on the point of bursting into a valedictory of abuse—even of attack—but he thought better of it, and as he went out there was a shamble in the step that had swaggered.
Colonel Wallifarro's country place had been opened for the summer, and a series of house parties were to follow in Anne's honour, but as yet the season was young and, except for Boone, Victor McCalloway was the family's only guest.
One evening near to sunset the soldier was sitting alone with Anne under the spread of tall pines that swayed and whispered in the light breeze. Before them, graciously undulating to the white turnpike a quarter of a mile distant, went the woodland pasture where the bluegrass lay dappled with the shadows of oak and walnut. It was a land of richness and tranquil charm: the first reward of the pioneers in their great nation-building adventure beyond the unknown ranges. McCalloway's eyes were full of appreciation. They dwelt lingeringly on blooded mares nibbling at rich pasturage, with royally sired foals nuzzling at their sleek flanks. Filling in the distance of a picture that seemed to sing under a singing sky, were acres of wheat waving greenly and of the young hemp's plumed billowing: of woodland stretches free of rock or underbrush. In the branches of the pines a red cardinal flitted, and from a maple flashed the orange and black gorgeousness of a Baltimore oriole. Then the man's eyes came back to the girl.
The figure in its simple summer dress was gracefully lissome. The features, chiseled to a pattern of high-bred delicacy, were yet instinct with strength. As Boone was the exponent of the hills of hardship, which had been the barriers the pioneers had to conquer, so, he thought, was she the flower of that nurture that had bloomed in the places of their victory.
Just now the violet eyes were brimming with grave thoughtfulness, like the shadow of a cloud upon living colour. When McCalloway looked at those eyes he recalled the water in the Blue Grotto, whose scrap of vividness transcends all the other high-keyed colour of Naples Bay—Naples Bay, which is itself a saturnalia of colour!
Without doubt his protégé had set his heart on a patrician—but at the moment there was more wistfulness than joyousness in her face, causing the subtle curvature of her lips to droop where so often a smile flashed its brightness.
"Anne," he slowly asked, "would it be impertinence for an old fellow to question that look of dream—almost of anxiety—that seems an alien expression on your face?"
The preoccupation vanished, and she turned her smile upon him.
"Was I looking as dismal as all that?" she demanded. "I guess it was the unaccustomed strain of thinking."
"You remind me," he went on thoughtfully, "of a woman I once thought—and I have never changed my mind—the most charming in Europe. Of course that means no more nor less than that I loved her."
Anne flushed at the compliment and, quickly searching the gray eyes for a quizzical twinkle, found them entirely grave.
"How do I remind you of her, Mr. McCalloway?" The question was put gently.
"I've been asking myself that question, and an exact answer eludes me." He paused a moment, then went soberly on: "Your hair is a disputed frontier, where brown and gold contend for dominion, and hers is midnight black. Your eyes are violet and hers are dark, flecked, in certain lights, with amber. Your colour is that of an old-fashioned rose garden—and hers that of a poppy field."
"It must be only by contrast, then, that I make you think of her," mused the girl. "We are absolute opposites."
"In detail, yes; in essentials, no," protested the man who was old enough to compliment boldly and directly. "You share the quality of goodness, but in itself that's as requisite to character and as externally uninteresting as bones in a body. You share a rarer gift, too. It's not so essential, but it crowns and enthrones its possessor and is life's rarest gift: pure charm. Relative charm we find now and again, but sheer, unalloyed charm is a flower that blooms only under the blue moon of magic."
The pinkness of Anne's cheeks grew deeper.
"Where is she now, sir?"
"For many years she has been where magic is the common law: in Paradise."
"Oh, forgive me. You spoke of her—"
"In the present tense," interrupted the soldier. "Yes, I always do. It is so that I think of her." He broke off, then went on in a changed voice, "But the gravity in eyes that laugh by divine right calls for explanation."
For an instant a tiny line of trouble showed between her brows, and the seriousness returned.
"I think perhaps, Mr. McCalloway, you are the one person I can tell." She paused as though trying to marshal the sequences of a difficult subject, then spoke impulsively:
"Boone doesn't realize it," she said slowly. "I don't want him to know, because there's nothing he can do about it—yet. Since I made my début—and that was almost three years ago—I've been under a pressure that's never relaxed. It hasn't been the sort of coercion one can openly fight, but the harder, more insidious thing. It's in mother's eyes—in everything—the unspoken accusation that I'm an ingrate: that I'm selfishly thinking only of myself and not at all of my family."
"You mean in not marrying Morgan?"
The girl nodded. "And in refusing to give Boone up. When he was in Louisville all the time, it was easier. I had his courage to lean on—but since he went back to plan his race for the legislature, I've felt very much alone and outnumbered. They are all so gently immovable. It's terrible to feel that your family are your enemies."
"And your heart refuses the thought of surrender?"
Anne looked at him quickly, and for her eyes he could no longer employ the Blue Grotto as a simile. The waters there are shallow, and in that moment of soul-unmasking he looked through her irises into deeps of feeling, sincere and unalterable, and far down under fathoms of slighter things into the basic pools of passion.
"You can hardly call it refusal," she said in a low voice, shaded with a ghost-touch of indignation. "I have never considered it."
"So I had hoped," he responded gravely, "but I owe you the frankness of admitting that I wasn't sure. On such subjects the boy has naturally been reticent. I could be sure only of howhefelt. I wanted to see him get on, and I knew what your influence would mean to him. It has been what sunlight is to a place where the shadows lie too thick. In the mountains, my dear, cows that browse where the sun doesn't penetrate get 'dew poisoning.' Human beings get it from the milk. To both it is often fatal. There's dew poisoning in Boone's blood, too, from generations of brooding shadows. He needed you."
He paused, and she bent forward. "Yes," she prompted softly.
"So I was glad for every moment he had with you—glad enough, even, to endure the thought of what it might ultimately cost him in the usury of heartache."
"And you were willing to let him undergo the heartache?" Her voice perceptibly hardened. "I'm afraid that's a loyalty I can't understand."
"It's the loyalty of a soldier's faith in him," he responded briefly. "I believed that if he must go through the fire he would come out of it not slag, but good metal."
"If his heart has to ache,"—the girl's eyes were tender again—"it won't be because I fail him."
"And, for the present, it is you who are paying the assessments of heartache?"
"I guess it's not quite that bad,"—but her smile was forced. "I'm merely being gloomed on by melancholy in the family circle as a life-hope going to wreck. By a nod of my head—an acquiescent one to Morgan—I could set the broken family fortunes up again beyond danger and make everybody happy—except myself and Boone. They can't see anything but sheer perversity in my refusal. They see me, as they think, drifting on a sea of poverty and spinsterhood when the port lies open; they see me as a bridesmaid to my friends getting married—even as a godmother to their children—and they shake gloomy heads because the water is all running by the mill!"
"And you are—how old?"—McCalloway's eyes were twinkling with the question, "—in your hopeless celibacy?"
"Twenty-one," came the exact answer. "But it's not just that. Boone still has his way to make. This fall the legislature—two years hence a race for Congress. It's all a very long road."
The soldier nodded his head in understanding. "Yes, it's the waiting game that strains the staunchest morale," he admitted. "And you realize that it won't grow easier. But what of Morgan himself?"
"I guess if there were no Boone," she made candid admission, "Morgan would have won. He has force and power—and I am a worshipper of those things in a man. I thought at first he was a prig, but he's developed. It may be generosity or it may be calculation, but he will neither consent to give me up—nor try to hurry me. He plays the game hard, but he plays it fair."
McCalloway rekindled the pipe that had died, and his next words followed a meditative cloud of smoke from his lips. "It's not hard to understand any man's loving you. I happen to know that more than a few have. Yet if any one might escape, I'd pick Morgan. For him social values and externals are ruling passions. For you they are incidental only."
Anne nodded, but her answer went arrow-straight to the core of the truth. "Morgan fancies me because he thinks I'm popular and well-born. It would make no difference to Boone if I were friendless."
Her confidant laughed. "Here comes Boone himself," he said, rising. "Of late he's been building his political fences and hasn't seen enough of you. I am going to leave you, but at any time that the counsel of an old fellow can help you, call on me, my dear. I'm always at your command—yours and his."
As he turned his steps toward the house, McCalloway saw the Colonel rouse himself from his afternoon nap in his verandah chair. That morning'sCourier-Journalslipped down from the forehead it had been screening against the sun, and the Colonel became aware of a presence at his side. Moses, his butler, stood there with juleps on a tray.
As McCalloway arrived on the verandah and took his glass from the negro, his host rose with a yawning and apologetic smile. "If you'll pardon me, sir," he said, "I'll leave you long enough to dip my sleepy face into a basin of cold water." But when the master had gone the servant lingered until, with an inquisitive impulse, McCalloway put a question.
"Moses, what is your other name? I've never heard it, have I?"
The darkey smiled. "I reckon not, sir. 'Most everybody calls me Colonel Wallifarro's Mose."
The guest reflectively sipped his julep. Moses had always interested him by virtue of his decorous address, which escaped the usual negro pomposity as entirely as his speech escaped the negro dialect. Moses was endowed, not with manners but with a manner—to himself, McCalloway had almost said "the grand manner." It was as if his life, close to fine and sincere things, had made him, despite his blackness of skin, also a gentleman.
"But you have a surname, I dare say."
"Yes, sir. Wallver."
"The same as the Colonel's?"
The butler smiled with an infectious good humour and bowed his head.
"Yes, sir. In slave times we servants took our names from our masters. I reckon my parents did like the rest. But the coloured people spell it the shortest way."
"I see. And you have always been in his service?"
"Whenever he kept house, sir. When Mrs. Wallifarro died and Mr. Morgan was at boarding school, the Colonel lived at the Club. I was assistant steward there during that time, sir."
"Ah, that accounts for a number of things," hazarded the guest with a smile. "For yourex cathedraknowledge of serving wines, for example."
"No, sir, I hardly think so." There was a respectful trace of negation and hauteur in the disclaimer. "I learned in the Colonel's house. That was why they wanted me at the Club."
"Of course; I beg your pardon."
When the coloured man had withdrawn, the smile lingered on the weathered face of the soldier, drawing pleasing little wrinkles about his eyes. Here indeed was that traditional and charming flavour of ingredients which the South has given to the diverse table of the nation.
Colonel Wallifarro was a gentleman in whom the definition of aristocracy found justification; the negro, a survivor of that form of slavery in which the master held his chattel, was a human soul in trust—they were Wallifarros white and black!
Then McCalloway's eyes fell on Boone as he greeted Anne, and a new thought flashed into his mind.
"Wallifarro—Wallver—Wellver," he exclaimed to himself under his breath. "Boone said his old grandfather spoke of his people being lords and ladies once!"
His mind, tempted into a speculative train of ideas, began weaving a pattern of genealogical surmise—a pattern involving not only the blood-lines of a single family, but also the warp and woof of national beginnings. In his imagination he completed the trinity. The Colonel and his servant were exponents of the Old South and its gracious oligarchy. Boone sprang from the hills that bred a race which some one had called "The Roundheads of the South." Yet at the start Boone's blood and that of the Colonel's had perhaps been one blood: the sap of a single and identical tap-root. Two brothers, setting out together in that hegira of empire seekers that turned their faces west, had perhaps been separated by the chances of the wilderness trail. One had won through, and his sons and daughters had dwelt in ease. One had fallen by the hard road, and the mould of decay had taken him root and branch. The name of the stranded one had lapsed into its phonetic equivalent—as had the negro's—and yet—
"No matter. He does not seem to have guessed it," murmured McCalloway. "Perhaps after all it's as well so. He'll make the name as he wears it one that men will come to know."
Summer, before it has freckled into hot fulness and forgotten the fresh scent and colour of blossoms! June heralding blitheness from the golden throats of troubadour field larks, rustling and crooning her message in green branches under a sky whose blue is proclamation of her love motif!
Certainly to Boone Wellver and Anne Masters picking strawberries together in a little arbour-walled, orchard-bounded world of garden, the centre of life lay within themselves, and the letters of life spelled "You and I."
On the girl's uncovered hair the stir of a light breeze and the sparkle of a clear sun awoke that dispute of dominion of which McCalloway had spoken; contention along the borderland between brown and gold. On her cheek the crystal brightness threw its searching question and revealed no flaw.
Boone, looking up from the place where he knelt among the vines, found in his own heart the echo to all the day's minstrelsy. He rose to his feet with his bronzed face paled under a sudden wave of emotion, which broke out of his surcharged feeling as a whitecap breaks on the crest of a high running swell. His eyes, devouringly fixed on the girl, blazed into a wordless adoration, and he felt, at once, giant-strong and water-weak in the surge of the great paradox. It would just then have been as easy for him to construe the fourth dimension as to put his lover's thoughts into a lover's words, but her woman's eyes read what he could not say and became bafflingly deep as she turned them away across the gold and blue and green of the morning.
Boone's arms twitched at his sides under the fret of his inarticulate fulness of spirit. The only language left in him was that primitive language of action. His, under the superimposed structure of acquired things, was a heritage which could know no love that was not a soul-stirring passion; no hate that was not a withering fire.
Now it seemed to him that under the hurricane power of his love for Anne Masters the pillars of the world shook. He caught her in his arms and pressed her to him until her hair brushed his cheek and her heart-beat could be felt against his breast.
His voice, at last regained, was broken like that of a man sobbing.
"I can't say it—there aren't any words—for it!"
All his previous love-making had made Anne remember that first agitated confession, "I think of you like the evening star—you're as far out of reach as if you were up there in heaven." Always there had been something almost humble in his deference, as if he had admitted himself a vassal lifting eyes to royalty. Now he was seizing her with the fierce proprietary embrace of one who claims his own and who will not be denied. The arms that held her pressed her till they hurt in the embrace of the untamed man for his own woman, and, since for her too, love was the great paradox, the fierce and ardent flood that had swept him lifted her on its tide and rang through her with a sort of wild triumph.
"You—you don't have to say anything—now," she told him somewhat faintly. If it had been up yonder, with the jutting escarpments of the hills about them, this wild moment would have shaped itself in more orthodox fashion with the eternal fitnesses. But the moment left them with something of tumultuous exaltation, as though they had burst together through the shell of a superficial world and touched the essentials.
After a little, when again they could realize the more tranquil voices of the birds and the little winds, Anne, with a hand on each of his shoulders, spoke slowly and very thoughtfully:
"I don't need to be told, Boone. If I didn't know, life wouldn't be worth much to me."
"When I'm away from you," he answered still in a shaken voice, "I always hear your voice. I always see you, yet when I come back to you, you're always a surprise to me—I find that my memory hasn't been able to do you justice."
She was silent for a little, and then into the serene contentment of her eyes crept a tiny shadow of trouble.
"Boone, dear," she said soberly, "we have a long time to wait—and we can't afford to—let ourselves—be tempest-tossed this way—until we can see the end. We can't be patient and—like this—at the same time."
"How can I be patient?" he demanded.
"You know," she reminded him. "I'm not wearing an engagement ring yet and—"
His face shadowed ruefully, but he forced a confident smile and pitched his tone to the manner of jest.
"The ring that's fit for you to wear ought to cost a king's ransom, Anne," he declared, "and I haven't any monarchs in the 'jail-house' just yet."
"It isn't that, dear, and you know it. If I were to wear your ring now—with years perhaps of waiting—it would only mean endless war at home. There'll be unavoidable battles enough when the time comes. It hardly seems worth while to court them in advance."
"I knew,"—he spoke with a heavy heart—"that they'd take you through the torture chamber before they let you marry me. Are you sure, dearest, that I'm worth it to you?"
The girl's head came up with the tilt of pride which he loved, and with the violet blaze in its eyes.
"Have I complained?" she asked.
"Anne,"—the man bent forward and spoke with the fervent earnestness of invincible resolve—"I have a long way to go. I'm still down on the ground level and you are still the evening star! Stars and groundlings, dear heart! They're very far apart, but there's a beacon burning before me and there's a magic in your love!" His expression had grown as tender as it had a little while before been elemental, yet it was not less purposeful. "In time, by God's grace I shall climb up to you, but it's a steep journey, and it's asking a good deal of you to mark time while I travel it."
"It's asking so much," declared the girl, "that I wouldn't do it if it wasn't the one thing in the world I want to do—if my heart wasn't set on that and nothing else."
"Thank God!" he breathed, "and thankyou!"
After a little Anne spoke speculatively:
"I've missed you rather terribly this time. You've seemed to be away so long."
"I've been building political fences, but to me it's been exile," he told her. "This race for the legislature seems a trivial thing to keep me away from you. If I win it—and God knows I'vegotto win—it's still a petty victory. But it's the first stage of the journey, and after the legislature comes Congress. You see, small as it is, it's vital."
Anne studied the gossamer building about which a spider was busying itself, and Boone knew that in her mind some matter was demanding discussion. He waited for her to broach it and soon she began.
"Morgan held politics in contempt until he went too far into the game to abandon it, but even now he's seeking to make it lead to something else."
"What?" inquired Boone, wondering what topic Anne was approaching by this path of indirection.
"I can tell you without abusing a confidence," she laughed, "because he's never told me. I've only guessed it, but I'm sure I'm right. His goal is a European embassy with a life near the trappings of a throne. And since Morgan is Morgan, he'll get it. He never fails."
"In one thing," announced Boone shortly, "he's going to fail."
Anne nodded, "In one thing he is," she agreed. "But if he goes into the diplomatic service, Boone, there'll be a place left vacant in the firm. Have you thought of that? Wouldn't your own future lie smoother that way? You could take your place here at the bar instead of struggling to herd wild sheep, and in the end you'd be Uncle Tom's logical successor."
Boone's face became sober, almost, Anne thought, distressed. The easy swing of his shoulders stiffened, and Anne intuitively knew that instead of suggesting a new thought she had broached a subject of painful deliberation, already mulled over with a heavy heart.
Into the young lover's mind flashed the picture of a rough hill evangelist exhorting rougher hearers, and of scriptural words: ... "taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them."
Finally he spoke: "Ihavethought of it, Anne.... The Colonel has even suggested it.... Of course he hasn't said anything about Morgan's going away; he only intimated that there might be a place for me in the practice."
"You didn't refuse? It's a good law firm, you know—old and honoured."
Suddenly he spread his hands in a gesture almost of appeal, as though he hoped she might understand and yet hardly dared to expect it.
"Anne, those wild sheep you just spoke of are my people. Perhaps with all their faults they have a few virtues too, and, if they have, loyalty to their own blood is chief of them. The world knows most about their murders, their moonshining and their abysmal ignorance, but you know that their blood is the most undiluted and purest American blood in America. You know that their children grow up illiterate only because they have no alternative. You know that those people are wild, lawless, but, thank God, generous to a fault, and as honest as the sun is bright. You know that even in their law-breaking they don't follow a base criminality so much as a perverted code of ethics. I was one of them. I inherited their blood-hatreds and their squalor, and because of generous friends I was rescued. If I am worth the effort spent on me at all, I owe it to those men, who saved me from what I might have been, to do my utmost for my 'wild sheep.'"
The girl was counting the iridescent threads of the spider's web, but her eyes caught the fixity with which his hand had unconsciously clenched itself. All that he said was undoubtedly true and creditable. She would not, in theory, have had him feel or speak otherwise, yet, since it is as impossible to eliminate one's ego from thought as to see through one's reflection in a mirror, she felt suddenly sick at heart.
If the effect of his liberation from the squalid things of his origin meant, after all, only to bind him the more strongly to them; if a quixotic sense of obligation barred him from the broader world he had won to, wherein lay the virtue of salvation? She loved the majestic wildness of the hills and the sweep of their free winds, but of the people in general she had thought as one gently bred and nurtured might naturally think of the less fortunate and more vulgar of the world.
Then she heard his words going on again but seeming to sound from a distance:
"Except for what generous friends did for me, I might—I would in all probability have grown as rank and wild as many other boys up there. The feud would perhaps have claimed me. For human life and human rights, I might have had the same contempt, and instead of standing here free and fortunate I might even now be wearing stripes in the penitentiary. If I've escaped, I think my people are entitled to what little I can offer them."
Anne felt a weight of foreboding on her heart, but she laid her hands on his shoulders. "Of course, dear," she said softly, "it's not just getting to the place, after all, is it? One must travel the right road, too."
On the deck-rail of a coast-wise fruit steamer beating down from equatorial waters leaned two men, whose ages were seemingly about forty. Off the starboard bow lay the island of San Lorenzo, yellow in the sun, with its battered crown of broken fortress. Ahead lay Callao, yellow, too, with its adobe walls, and rust-red where its corrugated iron roofs caught and husbanded the heat which needed no husbanding. Far off, between terraces of sand and the slopes of San Cristobal, one could make out the church towers of Lima.
The two travellers looked idly, somewhat contemptuously, on a shore line that had fired the imagination of Pizarro and his conquistadores. They were not of those to whom historic associations lend glamour, neither were they themselves precisely objects of romantic interest. One was dark of hair and skin and saturnine of expression. The other was blond, floridly blond, and unmistakably Teutonic.
"Know anything about oil, mein friendt?" inquired the fair-haired traveller, and the other laughed.
"Oil? My middle name's oil. I've drilled it in Mexico and—" abruptly the speaker became less expansive as he added, "and elsewhere."
The German smiled. "Elsewhere?" he observed. "It is a large place—nein? Has oil been always your business?"
From Guayaquil they had been travelling companions, but they had shared no personal confidences. The reply came non-committally.
"I've followed some several things."
The Teuton did not press his interrogations, and a silence fell between the two. While it lasted, the face of Saul Fulton settled into a frown of discontent.
At Lima there would perhaps be mail, and upon the answer to a letter written long ago his future plans depended.
"Shall we dine together in Lima?" The suggestion came at last from the German. "So perhaps we shall be less bored."
Saul Fulton nodded. "Why not? I'll meet you at the American café at six, but the dinner'll be on me."
Fulton could afford to entertain if the spirit moved him, and if his news was good he would have the wish to celebrate. These years of his wanderings since he had left home with an indictment hanging above his head had not all been lean, but prosperity in exile had of late become bitter on his tongue with the ashiness of dead-sea fruit. Saul was homesick. He wanted to shake from his feet for ever this dry dust of the rainless west coast. He wanted to see the stars come up out of a paling lemon afterglow, across peaks ragged with hardwood and fringed with pine.
He had tasted the bread and wine of many latitudes, and perhaps in all of them life had been more kindly than in the mountains of his birth, yet no child could be more homesick. He wanted to parade before the pinch of his neighbour's poverty the little prizes of his ignoble success—and, more than that, he wanted something else.
But when the sun was dropping back of San Cristobal's cone he stood on a cobble-stoned street on the outskirts of Lima, cursing under his breath with a torn envelope in his hand. His letter had not brought him good news.
The communication, in the first place, had not come from the man to whom he had written, though he grudgingly admitted that perhaps this vicarious reply was essential to caution.
"To come back here now would be the most heedless thing in the world, he says." That had been the hateful gist culled from the detail. The "he says" must refer to the unnamed attorney, to whom Saul had made the confession which gave value to his evidence against Asa Gregory.
If Asa were free, of course he knew that to return to Marlin County would be to ask insistently for death—and not to ask in vain. But Asa lay securely immured behind jail walls which would not be apt to open for him unless to let him pass into the still safer walls of the penitentiary or out into the cemented yard where the gallows stood.
The forces of the prosecution owed him something. They owed him so much that he had walked in no terror of extradition, or even, after a prudent absence, molestation at home. Technically of course he still stood charged as an accomplice to murder who had forfeited his bond, but there may be divergences between a technical and an actual status. The attorney who preferred now not to be quoted had doubtless discussed the matter with the Commonwealth, and that the Commonwealth had no wish to hound him was indicated by this passing on of the advice "ride wide."
Who then stood between him and a safe return to the State he had served with vital testimony? This letter told him in the none too elegant phrasing of a friend from the hills.
"Asa himself won't bother you unless the Governor pardons him out—and the Governor ain't likely to do that. He's the man that went in when Goebel died. I say he ain't likely to pardon Asa—but still there has been some changes here. The Democrat party has had some quarrels inside itself. The Louisville crowd has been kicked out by this same governor, and the lawyers that helped get it done were the Wallifarro crowd. You may not remember much about Boone Wellver, because he was a kid when you left, but he thinks Asa's a piece of the moon, and he's a lawyer now hisself in Wallifarro's offices. Those men stand close to the Governor, and this Boone Wellver has wore out the carpet at Frankfort, tramping in to argue for Asa's pardon. But that ain't all. He's talked hisself blue in the face trying to have you brought back and hung. Back in Marlin he's aimin' to go to the legislature and he's buildin' up influence. If he wins out he's goin' to be a power there, and, if he gets to be, you can't never come home."
"Asa himself won't bother you unless the Governor pardons him out—and the Governor ain't likely to do that. He's the man that went in when Goebel died. I say he ain't likely to pardon Asa—but still there has been some changes here. The Democrat party has had some quarrels inside itself. The Louisville crowd has been kicked out by this same governor, and the lawyers that helped get it done were the Wallifarro crowd. You may not remember much about Boone Wellver, because he was a kid when you left, but he thinks Asa's a piece of the moon, and he's a lawyer now hisself in Wallifarro's offices. Those men stand close to the Governor, and this Boone Wellver has wore out the carpet at Frankfort, tramping in to argue for Asa's pardon. But that ain't all. He's talked hisself blue in the face trying to have you brought back and hung. Back in Marlin he's aimin' to go to the legislature and he's buildin' up influence. If he wins out he's goin' to be a power there, and, if he gets to be, you can't never come home."
At that point Saul lowered the pages of the letter and cursed again under his breath. Then he read on again though by now he knew the contents by heart.
"It was heedless for you to write to Jim Beverly. Wellver heard of that through some tattle-talk and went to the Commonwealth attorney and told where you was at. He'll hound you as long as he lives, and if you come back here you'll walk into his trap—unless you can contrive to get him out of the way. He stands across your path, and you've got either to lay low or get rid of him. If you came back here, one of you would have to die as sure as God sits on high."
"It was heedless for you to write to Jim Beverly. Wellver heard of that through some tattle-talk and went to the Commonwealth attorney and told where you was at. He'll hound you as long as he lives, and if you come back here you'll walk into his trap—unless you can contrive to get him out of the way. He stands across your path, and you've got either to lay low or get rid of him. If you came back here, one of you would have to die as sure as God sits on high."
Saul thrust the letter back into his pocket. A string of pack llamas swung grunting by under their loads, driven by ponchoed cholos. Overhead a vulture lumbered by. From the stand of a street vendor drifted the odours of skewered fowl-livers and black olives. Over the whole Spanish-American panorama brooded the treeless foothills of the Cordilleras that went back to the Andes. Everything that came to eye and nostril of Saul Fulton carried the hateful aspect and savour of the alien.
"I disgust the whole damn land," he declared as he rose, for though he no longer felt in a mood of celebration it was time to meet the "Dutchman" for dinner.
Reticence was second nature to the plotter who had just heard of the growing power of a new enemy, but there was wine for dinner and a sympathetic listener, and under the ache of nostalgia and the need of outpouring, his discretion for once weakened.
It was late when over their coffee cups and cigarettes Saul realized that he had been talking too freely, but the German leaned forward and nodded a sympathetic head.
"I am discreet," he reassured. "I understand."
After a moment he added, "It may surprise you, mein friendt, to learn that I, too, have been in your Kentucky mountains. It was when they first talked of oil there some years back.... I did not remain long.... Oil there was but not in gushers ... at the price of the markets it did not pay. It only tantalized with false hope."
Saul looked up. A crafty gleam shot into his eyes as he started to speak, then he repressed the words on his lips and remained silent.
After a long while, however, he began hesitantly:
"There's oil there still—and there's places where it would pay. That's why I'm itchin' to go back. With what I know now and those fools there don't know, I could get rich; big rich, and this damned young Wellver stands barrin' my way."
"Perhaps,"—the German spoke tentatively—"we could do business together. I go to the States shortly mein-self."
"Business, hell!" Saul Fulton's hand smote the table. "A stranger couldn't swing things. Folks would jump prices on you. They suspicion strangers, there."
He sat silent for a time, and the German puffed contemplatively at his cigarette. Outside somewhere a band was playing. Above the patio where they sat at table the stars were large and tranquil. A fountain plashed in silvery tinkles.
Saul Fulton's face grew sinister with its thoughts, and when at last he spoke again it was with the air of a man who has debated to a conclusion the problem that besets him and who, having decided, sets his foot into the Rubicon of action.
"I'm goin' back there, myself. There's ways an' means of gettin' rid of brash trouble-makers, an' if any man knows 'em in an' out, an' back an' forth, it's me."
Otto Gehr shrugged his white-coated shoulders.
"The fit should survive," he made answer.
Saul raised his almost empty glass. "Here's Luck," he said. "This Wellver lad is marked down for what's comin' to him."
Morgan's car was making the most rapid progress through the downtown traffic that the law allowed, and his electric energies were fretting for greater speed. The days were all too short for him with their present demands, and he forced himself with the merciless rigour of a man who is both overseer and slave. Now he was allowing himself just forty-five minutes for luncheon at the club, and back at the office men and matters were waiting.
He found gratification in the deference with which policemen saluted, and in the glances that turned toward him as his chauffeur slowed down at the corners. He knew that his fellow townsmen were saying, "That's Morgan Wallifarro!" It was enough to say that, for the name bore its own significance. It meant, "That is the man who has just carried a Democratic town for a Republican mayor, and who had much to do with carrying a Democratic State for a Republican governor. Even in national councils his voice begins to bear weight."
These things were incense in the nostrils of the hurrying young lawyer, but suddenly his attention was arrested from them, and he rapped on the glass front of the closed car. He had seen Anne on the sidewalk, and at his signal the machine swung in to the curb and halted.
"I'm on my way home," she told him, "and you're far too rushed to cavalier me during business hours," but he waved aside her remonstrances and helped her in.
"I'm so busy," he declared, "that I can't waste a moment—and every possible moment lost from you is wasted."
The November sun was clear and sparkling, and the girl settled back with an amused smile as she looked into the self-confident, audacious eyes of the man at her side.
"It gives me a feeling of exaggerated importance to ride in your machine, Morgan," she teased. "It's a triumphal progress through the bowing multitude."
Her companion grinned. "When are you going to make my car your car and my homage your homage, Anne?" he brazenly demanded.
The girl's laugh rippled out, and in her violet eyes the twinkle sparkled. She liked him best when he was content to clothe his words in the easy garb of jest, so she countered in paraphrase.
"When are you going to let my answer be your answer, and my decision your decision?"
"It's no trouble to ask," he impudently assured her. "You remember the man who