clerks without remark, but with you–no.”
“But the world don’t know and don’t need to know,” he cried.
“Which makes it worse, in a way, feeling guilty of nothing and
yet sneaking around back-roads with all the feeling of doing
something wrong. It would be finer and braver for me
publicly…”
“To go to lunch with me on a week-day,” Daylight said, divining
the drift of her uncompleted argument.
She nodded.
“I didn’t have that quite in mind, but it will do. I’d prefer
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doing the brazen thing and having everybody know it, to doing the
furtive thing and being found out. Not that I’m asking to be
invited to lunch,” she added, with a smile; “but I’m sure you
understand my position.”
“Then why not ride open and aboveboard with me in the hills?” he
urged.
She shook her head with what he imagined was just the faintest
hint of regret, and he went suddenly and almost maddeningly
hungry for her.
“Look here, Miss Mason, I know you don’t like this talking over
of things in the office. Neither do I. It’s part of the whole
thing, I guess; a man ain’t supposed to talk anything but
business with his stenographer. Will you ride with me next
Sunday, and we can talk it over thoroughly then and reach some
sort of a conclusion. Out in the hills is the place where you
can talk something besides business. I guess you’ve seen enough
of me to know I’m pretty square. I-I do honor and respect you,
and… and all that, and I ..” He was beginning to flounder, and
the hand that rested on the desk blotter was visibly trembling.
He strove to pull himself together. “I just want to harder than
anything ever in my life before. I-I-I can’t explain myself, but
I do, that’s all. Will you?–Just next Sunday? To-morrow?”
Nor did he dream that her low acquiescence was due, as much as
anything else, to the beads of sweat on his forehead, his
trembling hand, and his all too-evident general distress.
CHAPTER XIV
“Of course, there’s no way of telling what anybody wants from
what they say.” Daylight rubbed Bob’s rebellious ear with his
quirt and pondered with dissatisfaction the words he had just
uttered. They did not say what he had meant them to say. “What
I’m driving at is that you say flatfooted that you won’t meet me
again, and you give your reasons, but how am I to know they are
your real reasons? Mebbe you just don’t want to get acquainted
with me, and won’t say so for fear of hurting my feelings. Don’t
you see? I’m the last man in the world to shove in where I’m not
wanted. And if I thought you didn’t care a whoop to see anything
more of me, why, I’d clear out so blamed quick you couldn’t see
me for smoke.”
Dede smiled at him in acknowledgment of his words, but rode on
silently. And that smile, he thought, was the most sweetly
wonderful smile he had ever seen. There was a difference in it,
he assured himself, from any smile she had ever given him before.
It was the smile of one who knew him just a little bit, of one
who was just the least mite acquainted with him. Of course, he
checked himself up the next moment, it was unconscious on her
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part. It was sure to come in the intercourse of any two persons.
Any stranger, a business man, a clerk, anybody after a few casual
meetings would show similar signs of friendliness. It was bound
to happen, but in her case it made more impression on him; and,
besides, it was such a sweet and wonderful smile. Other women he
had known had never smiled like that; he was sure of it.
It had been a happy day. Daylight had met her on the back-road
from Berkeley, and they had had hours together. It was only now,
with the day drawing to a close and with them approaching the
gate of the road to Berkeley, that he had broached the important
subject.
She began her answer to his last contention, and he listened
gratefully.
“But suppose, just suppose, that the reasons I have given are the
only ones?–that there is no question of my not wanting to know
you?”
“Then I’d go on urging like Sam Scratch,” he said quickly.
“Because, you see, I’ve always noticed that folks that incline to
anything are much more open to hearing the case stated. But if
you did have that other reason up your sleeve, if you didn’t want
to know me, if–if, well, if you thought my feelings oughtn’t to
be hurt just because you had a good job with me…” Here, his
calm consideration of a possibility was swamped by the fear that
it was an actuality, and he lost the thread of his reasoning.
“Well, anyway, all you have to do is to say the word and I’ll
clear out.
And with no hard feelings; it would be just a case of bad luck
for me. So be honest, Miss Mason, please, and tell me if that’s
the reason–I almost got a hunch that it is.”
She glanced up at him, her eyes abruptly and slightly moist, half
with hurt, half with anger.
“Oh, but that isn’t fair,” she cried. “You give me the choice of
lying to you and hurting you in order to protect myself by
getting rid of you, or of throwing away my protection by telling
you the truth, for then you, as you said yourself, would stay and
urge.”
Her cheeks were flushed, her lips tremulous, but she continued to
look him frankly in the eyes.
Daylight smiled grimly with satisfaction.
“I’m real glad, Miss Mason, real glad for those words.”
“But they won’t serve you,” she went on hastily. “They can’t
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serve you. I refuse to let them. This is our last ride, and…
here is the gate.”
Ranging her mare alongside, she bent, slid the catch, and
followed the opening gate.
“No; please, no,” she said, as Daylight started to follow.
Humbly acquiescent, he pulled Bob back, and the gate swung shut
between them. But there was more to say, and she did not ride
on.
“Listen, Miss Mason,” he said, in a low voice that shook with
sincerity; “I want to assure you of one thing. I’m not just
trying to fool around with you. I like you, I want you, and I
was never more in earnest in my life. There’s nothing wrong in
my intentions or anything like that. What I mean is strictly
honorable-”
But the expression of her face made him stop. She was angry, and
she was laughing at the same time.
“The last thing you should have said,” she cried. “It’s like
a–a matrimonial bureau: intentions strictly honorable; object,
matrimony. But it’s no more than I deserved. This is what I
suppose you call urging like Sam Scratch.”
The tan had bleached out of Daylight’s skin since the time he
came to live under city roofs, so that the flush of blood showed
readily as it crept up his neck past the collar and overspread
his face. Nor in his exceeding discomfort did he dream that she
was looking upon him at that moment with more kindness than at
any time that day. It was not in her experience to behold big
grown-up men who blushed like boys, and already she repented the
sharpness into which she had been surprised.
“Now, look here, Miss Mason,” he began, slowly and stumblingly at
first, but accelerating into a rapidity of utterance that was
almost incoherent; “I’m a rough sort of a man, I know that, and I
know I don’t know much of anything. I’ve never had any training
in nice things. I’ve never made love before, and I’ve never been
in love before either–and I don’t know how to go about it any
more than a thundering idiot. What you want to do is get behind
my tomfool words and get a feel of the man that’s behind them.
That’s me, and I mean all right, if I don’t know how to go about
it.”
Dede Mason had quick, birdlike ways, almost flitting from mood to
mood; and she was all contrition on the instant.
“Forgive me for laughing,” she said across the gate. “It wasn’t
really laughter. I was surprised off my guard, and hurt, too.
You see, Mr. Harnish, I’ve not been…”
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She paused, in sudden fear of completing the thought into which
her birdlike precipitancy had betrayed her.
“What you mean is that you’ve not been used to such sort of
proposing,” Daylight said; “a sort of on-the-run, ‘Howdy,
glad-to-make-your-acquaintance, won’t-you-be-mine’ proposition.”
She nodded and broke into laughter, in which he joined, and which
served to pass the awkwardness away. He gathered heart at this,