“You’d wait until the peach was fully ripe; then you’d reach up and pluck it.”
“No,” was the sober denial, made with no touch of resentment. “You must give the devil his due, Harry. It wasn’t altogether as rotten as that, though maybe it did lean a little that way, at times. Never mind; it’s all over now. You have a free field.”
“I?”
“Yes. I haven’t been blind. Jean is heart-free, and I saw at once that it was going to lie between us two. I’m eliminated.”
The edge had gone out of the play-boy’s voice and there was a faint smile at the bottom of his eyes when he said: “But, according to the way you stack things up, I am just as much of a false alarm as you are. Heaven knows, I’ve waded fully as deep in the mud as you have in the mire.”
“No; there is a difference. I know it now. Whatever you have done, you have contrived somehow, in some way, to keep your soul out of the mud. Flout the idea if you want to, but I know. I’ve lived with you for something better than a year and know what I’m talking about.”
Another interval of silence, and at the end of it Bromley got upon his feet.
“You are off?” said Philip, without looking up.
“Yes, I must go. I’m train-tired and perishing for a bath. You’re not meaning to run away from Denver, are you?”
“Oh, no; I suppose not. There is nowhere to run to.”