She laughed with gratification. “Your sublime confidence, while it is undoubtedly mistaken, is nevertheless appreciated,” she told him primly, moving away with her hands full of flowers. “If you've got the nerve, come inside and read some of my stuff; I want to know if it's any good at all.”
Presently he was seated upon the couch in the little, pathetically bright front room, and he was knitting his eyebrows over Val's beautifully regular handwriting,—pages and pages of it, so that there seemed no end to the task,—and was trying to give his mind to what he was reading instead of to the author, sitting near him with her hands folded demurely in her lap and her eyes fixed expectantly upon his face, trying to read his decision even as it was forming.
Some verses she had tried on him first. Kent, by using all his determination of character, read them all, every word of them.
“That's sure all right,” he said, though, beyond a telling phrase or two,—one line in particular which would stick in his memory:
“Men live and love and die in that lonely land,”—
he had no very clear idea of what it was all about. Certain lines seemed to go bumping along, and one had to mispronounce some of the final words to make them rhyme with others gone before, but it was all right—Val wrote it.
“I think I do better at stories,” she ventured modestly. “I wrote one—a little story about university life—and sent it to a magazine. They wrote a lovely letter about it, but it seems that field is overdone, or something. The editor asked me why, living out here in the very heart of the West, I don't try Western stories. I think I shall—and that's why I said I should need your help. I thought we might work together, you know. You've lived here so long, and ought to have some splendid ideas—things that have happened, or that you've heard—and you could tell me, and I'd write them up. Wouldn't you like to collaborate—'go in cahoots' on it?”
“Sure.” Kent regarded her thoughtfully. She really was looking brighter and happier, and her enthusiasm was not to be mistaken. Her world had changed. “Anything I can do to help, you know—”
“Of course I know, I think it's perfectly splendid, don't you? We'll divide the money—when there is any, and—”
“Will we?” His tone was noncommittal in the extreme.