Wayne glanced around their seclusion with his habitual caution, slightly knit his brows perplexedly, and said: “You fell in?”
“I didn't do nothin' of the sort. I JUMPED in.”
Wayne again looked around him, as if expecting her companion, and squeezed the water out of his thick hair. “Jumped in?” he repeated slowly. “What for?”
“To make you come over here, Mad Wayne,” she said, with a quick laugh, putting her arms akimbo.
They stood looking at each other, dripping like two river gods. Like them, also, Wayne had apparently ignored the fact that his trousers were rolled up above his bare knees, and Mrs. McGee that her red petticoat clung closely to her rather pretty figure. But he quickly recovered himself. “You had better go in and change your clothes,” he said, with grave concern. “You'll take cold.”
She only shook herself disdainfully. “I'm all right,” she said; “but YOU, Mad Wayne, what do you mean by not speaking to me—not knowing me? You can't say that I've changed like that.” She passed her hand down her long dripping braids as if to press the water from them, and yet with a half-coquettish suggestion in the act.
Something struggled up into the man's face which was not there before. There was a new light in his grave eyes. “You look the same,” he said slowly; “but you are married—you have a husband.”
“You think that changes a girl?” she said, with a laugh “That's where all you men slip up! You're afraid of his rifle—THAT'S the change that bothers you, Mad.”
“You know I care little for carnal weapons,” he said quietly. She DID know it; but it is the privilege of the sex to invent its facts and then to graciously abandon them as if they were only arguments. “Then why do you keep off from me? Why do you look the other way when I pass?” she said quickly.
“Because you are married,” he said slowly.