“Maybe you’re not, but you sure are acting it. If you don’t think that, why don’t you go on taking music lessons from Belle? What made you stop, all of a sudden?”
“That,” said Mary Hope stiffly, “is my own affair, Lance Lorrigan.”
“It’s mine, let me tell you. It’s mine, because it hits Belle; and what hits her hits me. If you think she isn’t good enough for you to visit, why in thunder have you been coming all this while? She isn’t any worse than she was two months ago, is she?”
“I’m not saying that she is.”
“Well, you’re acting it, and that’s a darn sight worse.”
“You ought to know that with all this trouble between your father and my father––”
“Well, can you tell me when they ever did have any truck together? Your father doesn’t hate 100 our outfit a darn bit worse than he ever did. He found a chance to knife us, that’s all. It isn’t that he never wanted to before.”
“I’ll thank you, Lance Lorrigan, not to accuse my father of knifing anybody. He’s my father and––”
“And that isn’t anything to brag about, if you ask me. I’d rather have my father doing time for stealing, than have him a darned, hide-bound old hypocrite that will lie a man into the pen, and then go around and pull a long face and call himself a Christian!”
“My father doesna lie! And he is not a hypocrite either. If your father was half as––” She stopped abruptly, her face going red when she saw Tom sitting on his horse beyond the shoulder of rock, regarding her with that inscrutable smile which never had failed to make her squirm mentally and wonder what he thought of her. She stood up, trembling a little.