“What lock? On what door?” Mary Hope passed a palm down her other cheek, thus obliterating another rivulet that had ceased to flow tears and was merely wet and itchy.
“If you please, ma’am, you can search me.” Lance looked at her innocently. “I didn’t bring any lock with me, and I didn’t bring any door with me. But I’ve got some screws and three nails and––lots of good intentions.”
“Good intentions are very rare in this country,” said Mary Hope, and made meaningless marks on the bare tabletop with a blunt pencil.
Lance heard a twang of Scotch in the “very rare” which pleased him. But he kept his position by the doorway, and he continued bashfully 138 turning his big hat round and round against his chest,––though the action went oddly with the Lorrigan look and the athletic poise of him. “Yes, ma’am. Quite rare,” he agreed.
“In fact, I don’t believe there is such a thing in the whole Black Rim country,” stated Mary Hope, plainly nonplussed at his presence and behavior.
“Could I show you mine?” Lance advanced a step. He was not sure, at that moment, whether he wanted to go with the play. Mary Hope was better looking than when he had seen her last. She had lost a good deal of the rusticity he remembered her to have possessed, but she was either too antagonistic to carry on the farce, or she was waiting for him to show his hand, to betray some self-consciousness. But the fact that she looked at him straight in the eyes and neither frowned nor giggled, set her apart from the ordinary range-bred girl.
“You talk like a country peddler. I’m willing to accept a sample, and see if they are durable. Though I can’t for the life of me see why you’d be coming here with good intentions.”
“I’d be mending a lock on a door. Is this the door, ma’am? And is this the lock?”
Since the door behind him was the only door within five miles of them, and since the lock dangled from a splintered casing, Mary Hope almost smiled. “It is a door,” she informed him. “And it is a lock that has been broken by a Lorrigan.”