"Dear, if you had only spared yourself what you could," Flavia grieved. "You could have said it was an accident, at least; that you never meant to hurt Allan."
Corrie's violet-blue eyes laughed out of their eclipse and sought his father.
"Not much, Other Fellow! No tricks for mine; I had to tell just the truth or shut up. No, sir, whatever he looked like, Corrie Rose had to plough a straight furrow."
"Straight furrows lead home," said Allan Gerard, not sententiously, but musingly.
He also looked toward Mr. Rose, and the senior nodded slow agreement.
"They do, Gerard. And we get more, sometimes, than we've any right to expect from anything we give. Where we spent this summer, Flavia and I liked the people. What we did for them didn't cost us much; we were not looking for any returns. But the news of it got out, somehow, and was cabled to New York days before we arrived here. One of the journals got the story and worked up a Sunday article about what an American millionaire had done for Val de Rosas, and interviewed a certain Luis Cárdenas and his wife, Elvira, whom Flavia had brought together—it seems they are happy and prospering well, my girl—and printed the whole thing along with a photograph of Corrie in his racing clothes, as my son. New York papers go everywhere. The Southerner whom Isabel was in love with brought that article about her family to her, as an excuse for an early call, the morning he asked her to marry him. She says, herself, it was the picture of Corrie in the motor dress she last had seen him wear on the day of the accident, that broke her up so, and when her lover proposed she told him the whole truth. If I hadn't paid the taxes for Val de Rosas, Corrie would have been bearing a false charge yet."
The silence held many thoughts; a silence broken by Corrie himself.
"To-morrow we'll write a jolly note to Isabel," he affirmed contentedly. "She doesn't need to worry on her honeymoon, poor kid; she has squared up. There doesn't seem to be any need for anyone to worry, ever, while they're trying to keep straight, since the scheme is a Square Deal, you know."
The two older men exchanged a glance.
"I guess some of us need more than a square deal, Corwin B.," his father pronounced. "But it's all right; we get that, too."