What Can She Do?

by Edward Payson Roe

"Necessity knows no choice," said Edith quickly. "I will go with you in any kind of a wagon, and I surely hope you won't leave me on this lonely dock in the rain."

"Certainly not," said Arden, reddening in the darkness that he could be thought capable of such an act. "But I thought I could drive to the village and send a carriage for you."

"I would rather go with you now, if you will let me," said Edith decidedly.

"The best I have is at your service, but I fear you will be sorry for your choice. I've only a board for a seat, and my wagon has no springs. Perhaps I could get a low box for you to sit on."

"Hannibal can sit on the box. With your permission I will sit with you, for I wish to ask you some questions."

Arden hung his lantern on a hook in front of his wagon, and helped or partly lifted Edith over the wheel to the seat, which was simply a board resting on the sides of the box. He turned a butter-tub upside down for Hannibal, and then they jogged out from behind the boat-house where he had sheltered his horses.

This was all a new experience to Arden. He had, from his surly misanthropy, little familiarity with society of any kind, and since as a boy he had romped with the girls at school he had been almost a total stranger to all women save those in his own home. Most young men would have been awkward louts under the circumstances. But this was not true of Arden, for he had daily been holding converse in the books he dreamed over with women of finer clay than he could have found at Pushton. He would have been excessively awkward in a drawing-room or any place of conventional resort, or rather he would have been sullen and bearish, but the place and manner in which he had met Edith accorded with his romantic fancy, and the darkness shielded his rough exterior from observation.

Moreover, the presence of this flesh-and-blood woman at his side gave him different sensations from the stately dames, or even the most piquant maidens that had smiled upon him in the shadowy scenes of his imagination; and when at times, as the wagon jolted heavily, she grasped his arm for a second to steady herself, it seemed as if the dusky little figure at his side was a sort of human electric battery charged with that subtile fluid which some believe to be the material life of the universe. Every now and then as they bounced over a stone, the lantern would bob up and throw a ray on a face like those that had looked out upon him from those plays of Shakespeare the scenes of which are laid in Italy.

Thus the dark, chilly, rainy night was becoming the most luminous period of his life. Reason and judgment act slowly, but imagination takes fire.

But to poor Edith all was real and dismal enough, and she often sighed heavily. To Arden each sigh was an appeal for sympathy. He had driven as rapidly as he dared in the darkness to get her out of the rain, but at last she said, clinging to his arm: