When a boy goes to bed remembering a girl's trembling hand does he ever ask himself who made that hand tremble, or does he always feel sure that it was he who stirred the young life to quivering?
CHAPTER XI
TERMS
The sudden abandonment of the Terence O'Brien crusade by Minga and Dunstan cast a chill over the other plotters and a sort of obstinate silence settled down on the young intruders on Watts Shipman's privacy. One of the boys got up, put his hands in his pockets and walked aimlessly about, kicking at pebbles and whistling; the girls' voices took on drawling inflections of careless indifference. The young lawyer tried some professional small talk that sounded oddly in the poetic surroundings of forest moonlight to which the senior listened without much interest. Shipman, with an amused sense of liking to see these calm young persons at a disadvantage, wondered if they would not under the awkward stress of the thing develop a few sensibilities, but he allowed the moment to remain as clumsy as it might be.
The only one who realized the man's inner comment was Sard; she it was who had fretted helplessly at the inopportune behavior of her girl friend; nettled, she now resolved that the meeting should be opened and she moved a little on the log where she sat.
Watts rose and gravely motioned her to take his abandoned seat. "You see the river better from there," he urged. "Rather nice in the moonlight, don't you think? You know Drake's 'Culprit Fay'? Of course, such a delicate poem, made of shells and straws and fairies' wings with this monster stream for background"—he shrugged, scanning the girl's face, saying lightly,—"Do you suppose all this beauty really got through the Dutchman's skin, or did it lie dormant till Irving brought it to life? A pity, after those 'historic fires of liberty,' and a young woman's college adorning it, and all the tremendous striking events of its history, that this river's chief ornaments should be a prison, a military academy and a lot of rich men's homes! Have you ever thought," went on Shipman purposefully, "what a marvelous thing it would be if we could have heroic statuary all along our river banks, really heroic statuary, sculpture of the great deeds of discovery, the statues of men who invented things for human good, great inventors, great mothers, great scientists, great writers, great explorers; not a single statue that should spell wars or the glory of wars, but all the superb names that bear witness to the everlasting wonder and glory and forward looking of Human Life."
Of course, this exhortation was to put her at her ease. The girl recognized this, and while she hardly heard the words of the man standing there, she thanked him mentally. As Sard met Shipman's eyes she tried to look as if she, at least, had completely forgotten the Minga incident. Anyway, Sard had seen things like that happen to Minga before. Only, in all those two years at college, reflected the girl, Minga had never been so completely, so lamentably driven from her accustomed aplomb. The thing did not make Sard like the great man any too well, but the memory of the figure of poor Dora at her work, the sense of a boy of Dunce's age going to prison "for life," these things spurred her on to what she had to say.
"Perhaps we ought to apologize for coming up here like this," began the girl tentatively, "but," she laughed a little, "I don't think we will."