“You are not a bad penny, however, Chess,” she told him, smiling. “You are a good scout. Now you may take me out in your motor-boat. If it is too late to fish, we can at least have a run out into the river. How pretty it is to-day!”
“If everybody treated me as nicely as you do, Ruth,” he said, rather soberly, “my head would be turned.”
“Cheer up, Chess,” she said, laughing. “I don’t say the worst is yet to come. Perhaps the best will come to you in time.”
“You say that only to encourage me I fear.”
“I certainly don’t say it to discourage you,” she confessed. “Going around like a faded lily isn’t going to help you a mite—and so I have already told you.”
“Huh! How’s a fellow going to register joy when he feels anything but?”
“You’d make a poor screen actor,” she told him. “See Mr. Grand to-day. He has an ulcerated tooth and is going to the Bay to-night to have it treated. Yet, as the French voyageur, he had to make love to Wonota and Miss Keith, both. Some job!”
“That fellow makes love as easy as falling off a log,” grumbled Chess. “I never saw such a fellow.”
“But the girls flock to see him in any picture. If he were my brother—or husband—I would never know when he was really making love or just registering love. Still actors live in a world of their own. They are not like other people—if they are really good actors.”
Copley’s Lauriette shot them half way across the broad St. Lawrence before sunset, and from that point they watched the sun sink in the west and the twilight gather along the Canadian shore and among the islands on the American side.