The girl cried under her breath, with an impatient gesture of her hand, “I’m not going to. But I hate it. It isn’t fair. Mary wants him to keep away. He bothers her.”
“I can keep him away.”
“You did tell him not to come.”
“I can make him not come,” said John Evered; and the girl fell silent, and said at last, “He’s writing to her. Oh, John, what can she do? More than she has done?”
“I’ll see to’t he stays away,” the young man promised; and the girl’s hand fell on his arm.
“Please do,” she said. “He’s so unfair to Mary.”
A little later, when they turned at last toward the house, John said half to himself, “If my father ever heard, he’d bust that man.”
“I wish he would,” the girl said hotly. “But—I’m afraid he’d find some way to blame Mary. He mustn’t know.”
“I’ll see Dane Semler,” John promised.
On the doorstep they kissed again. Then they went into the house together. Evered sitting by the lamp with his paper looked up at them bleakly, but said no word. Mary Evered smiled at her sister, smiled at John. She loved her husband’s son, had loved him like a mother since she came to the house and found him, a boy not four years old, helping with the chores as a grown man might have done. She had found something pitiful in the strength and the reserve of the little fellow; and she had mothered out of him some moments of softness and affection that would have surprised his father.