“That means, of course, that I’ll have to climb out,” Peter finally and very prosaically remarked.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s so apt to leave one of us sailing under false colors,” was his somewhat oblique way of explaining the situation. “I might have hung on until something happened, I suppose, if I hadn’t shown my hand. And I hadn’t quite the right to show my hand, when you take everything into consideration. But you can’t always do what you intend to. And life’s a little bigger than deportment, anyway, so what’s the use of fussing over it? There’s just one thing, though, I want to say, before we pull down the shutters again. I want you to feel that if anything does happen, if by any mischance things should take a turn for the worse, or you’re worried in any way about the outcome of all this”—he indulged in a quiet but comprehensive hand-wave which embraced the entire ranch that lay in the gray light at our feet—“I want you to feel that I’d be mighty happy to think you’d turn to me for—for help.”
It was getting just a little too serious again, I felt, and I decided in a bit of a panic to pilot things back to shallower water.
“But you have helped, Peter,” I protested. “Look at all that hay you cut, and the windmill here, and the orange marmalade that’ll make me think of you every morning!”
He leaned a little closer and regarded me with a quiet and wistful eye. But I refused to look at him.
“That’s nothing to what I’d like to do, if you gave me the chance,” he observed, settling back against the tower-standard again.
“I know, Peter,” I told him, “And it’s nice of you to say it. But the nicest thing of all is your prodigious unselfishness, the unselfishness that’s leaving this talk of ours kind of—well, kind of hallowed, and something we’ll not be unhappy in remembering, when it could have so easily turned into something selfishly mean and ugly and sordid. That’s where you’re big. And that’s what I’ll always love you for!”
“Let’s go down,” said Peter, all of a sudden. “It’s getting cold.”
I sat staring down at the world to which we had to return. It seemed a long way off. And the ladder that led down to it seemed a cobwebby and uncertain path for a lady whose heart was still slipping a beat now and then. Peter apparently read the perplexity on my face.