"Kiss me, dearie! You are very like your father, and he was the bravest man God ever made!" At the threshold she turned; "I think it entirely permissible—indeed, I much desire that you read that verse."
For the first time since her coming to the ranch, Grace Carter turned the key in the door lock; then she laid the notebook on her dressing table and completed her preparations for rest. Finally, she sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the book. Carefully she removed the flower and laid it on a silk handkerchief, folded for its reception. For a time she sat looking at it reminiscently; then with a visible effort she turned to the clearly-written pages.
She read with great deliberation, a second and then a third time, a hymn to love, boyishly crude, but charged to the full with youth and longing; no better and no worse, perhaps, than the average effusion of twenty-six in love, not with woman but with love; authentic, and for that reason sacred; overwrought, as became the heedless passion which inspired it; self-revealing, but of sex and temper rather than of mind. A few years back it would have shocked her; now, it made her think.
She replaced the flower, closed the book and thrust it under her pillow. Far into the night she sat there, her arms clasped about her knees, her eyes luminous but unseeing. Finally the night chill aroused her and she slipped into bed.
CHAPTER VIII
THE PASSING OF A CLOUD
But that was a week ago and now she was riding homeward with him in the moonlight. She had the notebook in the inside pocket of her riding jacket, having decided to return it to him in person, and this had been her first opportunity, he having been away for the whole of the previous week on some range matter requiring his personal attention.
He had evidently dropped the book from his shirt pocket during his struggle with the refractory gate, and on his return had interrogated everyone on the ranch about it except the actual finder, that worthy being absent at the time of his return on some errand for Miss Carter. He was very anxious for its recovery for more reasons than one. It contained some valuable memoranda about his range work; and then, again, he had private reasons why none of the men should chance to fall afoul of his metrical effusion. He was familiar with the coarse badinage of the camp, a humor that respects no personage, however high his official position, and the possibilities worried him.
He felt a great chagrin that he had as yet not been able to locate Matlock. In his supersensitiveness he was obsessed with an entirely unfounded impression that he was losing prestige among his men because of the unavoidable delay. If they were to learn that he had been farther guilty of the inexcusable weakness of writing verse of that sentimental character, his cup of bitterness would be running over!