"Do you doubt me, dear?" she asked. "In those politics that you are playing, I don't see anybody giving up—because there is opposition ahead."
Then the momentary despair altered in his manner to a grim expression of determination.
"Forgive me, Anne," he begged. "It's not that I doubt you—or ever could doubt you; but I know right well what a big word 'suitable' is in your mother's whole plan of life."
"I know it, too," was her grave response. "Mother's life has been an unhappy one, and she has given it all to me. That's why I say I have enough politics of my own. I couldn't bear to break her heart—and her heart is set on Morgan. So you see it's going to take some doing."
"Anne," he spoke firmly, but a tremour of feeling crept into his voice, "Mrs. Masters loves you with such a big and single love that it can't reason. Her own sufferings have come from knowing poverty, after she'd taken wealth for granted—so that is the one danger she'll guard against for you. It's an obsession with her. All the other things that might wreck your life—such as marrying a man you didn't love, for instance—she merely waves aside. If a man's been scarred with a knife, he's apt to forget that others have not only been hurt but killed by bullets. My God, dearest, she'll mean to be kind—but she'll put you on the rack—she'll take you straight through the torture-chamber, in her well-meant and cocksure certainty that she can choose for you better than you can choose for yourself."
"I think, Boone," said Anne, with more than a little pride in the rich softness of her voice, "you wouldn't hang back, because you had to come to me through things like that. I'm not afraid of the torture-chamber—it's just that I want to make it as easy for mother as I can."
On the night before the first day of registration Boone was dining at Colonel Wallifarro's house. Mrs. Masters found it difficult to maintain a total concealment of her distrust of the mountain boy. In her own heart she always thought of him as "that young upstart," but her worldly wisdom safeguarded her against the mistaken attitude of open hostility or even of too patronizing a tolerance. That course, she knew, had driven many high-spirited daughters into open revolt. "Make a martyr of him," she told herself with philosophically shrugged shoulders, "and you can convert an ape into a hero."
So after dinner Boone and the girl sat uninterrupted in the fine old drawing-room where the age-ripened Jouett portraits hung, while Morgan and his father went over some papers in the Colonel's study on the second floor.
"Boone," demanded the girl, "what is all this talk about camera squads and inspection parties? I'm afraid Uncle Tom—and you, too—are going to be running greater risks tomorrow than you admit."