"My face."
"You shouldn't say that," she chided, but not with the hearty sincerity that a friend would like to hear. "Are you going back to town?"
"I'll ride with you," he granted, feeling that for all her friendly advances the shadow of his taint lay between them.
They were three miles or more from town, the road running as straight as a plumbline before them. A little way they jogged on slowly, nothing said. Rhetta was the first to speak.
"What made you run away from me that day I wanted to speak to you, Mr. Morgan?"
"Did you want to, or were you just—did you want to speak to me that day, Miss Thayer?" Morgan's heart began to labor, his forehead to sweat, so hard was the rebirth of hope.
"And you turned right around and walked off!"
"You can tell me now," he suggested, half choking on the commonplace words, the tremor of his springing hope was so great.
"I don't remember—oh, nothing in particular. But it looks so strange for us—for you—to be dodging me—each other—that way, after we'd started being friends before everybody."
"Only for the sake of appearances," he said sadly. "I hoped—but you ran away and hid for a week, you thought I was a monster."