He stopped abruptly. For the fading of the happy light from Desirée’s eyes had its usual effect of leaving him wordless and miserable.
The girl, embarrassed, fell to turning the flowers over in their long box. She looked a little tired and her arrangement of the blossoms was perfunctory. A card was dislodged from among stems and fell to the floor. Caleb, picking it up, read Jack Hawarden’s name.
“The measly brat!” raged Conover, to himself. “He ain’t got a dollar to his back; an’ yet he can bring off a grandstand play like this, an’ make her look like she was a kid seein’ her first Christmas Tree! An now I’ve made her look like she wanted to cry! Lord! If I don’t give her a whole joolry store for Christmas, I’m a Chinaman!”
“Never mind, dear old boy!” she whispered, pressing close to his arm as they turned to mount the hill on the way to the Hawarden Cottage, “I’ll make believe they’re from you and that will be every bit as nice as if they really were. And you’ve done more lovely things for me than everybody else put together. And I won’t have you looking pathetic. Stop it! Now, smile! Oh, what a squidgy, weak sort of a smile! It’s all right, I tell you. I know you’d have given me much lovelier roses than these if you’d thought.”
“That’s just it!” he growled bitterly, “I don’t think. I never think. I guess you know I’d let ’em cut me up into city blocks if it’d make a hit with you, Dey. But what good does that do? When it comes to bein’ on hand with the million dinky little stunts that women likes, I’m always a mile away, somewhere, hoein’ corn. I wouldn’t blame you if you—”
“Stop!” she cried, a break in her clear voice, “You shan’t talk that way. Do you suppose all the presents in the world would have made me half as happy as having you here, this two weeks? Would any present have cost you one tenth the sacrifice of giving up your work for my sake? And just now you offered to throw away thousands of dollars and wreck half a dozen of people’s fortunes in order to please me by staying longer at the Antlers. What more could anyone do for me than you do?”
“I don’t know,” he answered simply, “But some day I may find out. An’ when I do,—why, I’ll do it. You can gamble on that, you little girl.”
CHAPTER XXI
FOREST MADNESS
It was late the next forenoon when the quartette, in two guide-boats, set out from the Antlers dock for their twenty-four hour picnic to Brown’s Tract Pond.
A guide had started an hour earlier with the camping equipment and pack. Jack and Mrs. Hawarden led the way; Desirée and Caleb being delayed in starting by the vast pressure and vaster quantities of candy that must be brought to bear on Rex before the collie would consent to trust his cautious young life in their boat. When at last the reluctant dog’s fears were overcome and he lay curled in a contented, furry heap at Desirée’s feet in the stern,—Caleb bent to his oars with a swing that sent the frail guide boat over the mile of intervening lake in time to enter the inlet a bare length behind the Hawardens. Under the low wooden bridge they passed. Then began an erratic progress.