"I can't talk and drive a speed-wagon at the same time," he told her, twisting the gray car into the road she had indicated, and he made the assertion good by covering the four remaining miles in the same preoccupied fashion.
There was a reason, of a sort, for his silence; two of them, to be exact. For one, he was troubled by that haunting sense of familiarity which was still trying to tell him that this was not his first meeting with Colonel Baldwin's daughter; and the other was much bigger, and more depressing. Though he was continually assuring himself that he had buried the former bank clerk and all of his belongings in a deep grave, some of the bank-clerk convictions still refused to remain decently in the coffin. One of these—and it had been daggering him sharply for the past half-hour—was the realization that in breaking with his past, he had broken also with the world of women—good women—at least to the extent of ever asking one of them to marry him.
Truly, though shadows are insubstantial things for the greater part, there is one exception. The shadow of a crime may involve both the innocent and the guilty quite as effectually as the thing itself, and Smith saw himself shut out automatically from the married beatitudes.... He pushed the thought aside, coming back to the other one—the puzzle of familiarity—when Miss Baldwin pointed to a transplanted Missouri farm mansion, with a columned portico, standing in a grove of cottonwoods on the left-hand side of the road, telling him it was Hillcrest.
There was a massive stone portal fronting the road, and when he got down to open the gates the young woman took the wheel and drove through; whereupon, he decided that it was time for him to break away, and said so.
"But how will you get back to the camp?" she asked.
"I have my two legs yet, and the walking isn't bad."
"No; but you might meet those men again."
"That is the least of my troubles."
Miss Corona Baldwin, like the Missouri colonel, her father, came upon moments now and then when she had the ultimate courage of her impulses.
"I should have said you hadn't a trouble in the world," she asserted, meeting his gaze level-eyed.