If the general could have forgotten the car for a while, he would have been agreeably pleased and flattered by the Watermelon's sudden apparent infatuation for him. The young man insisted on walking with him, suiting his long, lazy strides to the general's best endeavors. Bartlett, Henrietta and Billy swung along briskly ahead. Henrietta was touched. The boy was trying to show his sympathy, she thought, and liked him more than ever.
It was nearly noon when they came in sight of their destination, a gaunt gray farm-house, perched on the top of the gentle slope overlooking the valley and the winding river to the woods on the hills beyond. They came to the bars of a cow pasture and a narrow cow path leading across the field to the house, a shorter way than by the road.
Henrietta and Billy, seeing no cows in sight, allowed the Watermelon to let down the bars and to pass through. Billy waited inside the fence, standing by the path, among the sweet fern, until all had entered and all but the Watermelon had started up the path for the house.
Quietly she watched the Watermelon as he slowly and reluctantly replaced the bars.
"Jerry," said she, when he had at last finished, "what's the matter?" She had stepped into the path in front of him and he had to stop and face her.
He flushed hotly and would not look at her. "There is nothing the matter," said he. "Why? What makes you think so?"
She drew herself up with pretty dignity. "You need not have told me what you did yesterday in the railroad cut, if it were not so," said she, quite simply.
CHAPTER XXII
THE TRUTH AT LAST
"Billy," began the Watermelon, turning aside with darkening eyes, his flushed face growing slowly white as he realized that the reckoning had come. Billy must know all now, know who her companion of the past week was, know the status of the man who had told her he loved her. Then he turned to her again with all his mad, wild, foolish, hopeless longing in his eyes and voice and held out his arms.