“I’m tired of making music,” she said. “I’ve played my whole repertoire. Now I want Gene to come back into the sitting-room with me and tell me about the linen and the furniture I’m to send down to the ranch. We’ll talk it over to-night and make a list and arrange for the packing to-morrow.”
The young man rose, very glad to go with her, still uneasy and puzzled.
“How’s your cold, Rosey?” he said. “I didn’t know it was bad or I’d have asked more about it.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” she said carelessly. “It was never really bad, but I stayed in my room for a few days to be safe.” Her eye caught her father’s, half-shut and full of brooding scorn, shot through with a gleam of sardonic humor. Gene’s half-hour must have been even more trying than she had at first thought.
“Come along, Gene,” she said, holding out her hand to him, “we’ll leave the old man to his dreams. I know he never listened to a note of my music and only told me to play as an excuse to get rid of me.”
She threw a laughing look at her father, who answered it with a lazy, fond cast of his eye in her direction. Taking Gene’s hand, she drew him into the hall and dropped the portière. The father could hear their voices diminishing and growing muffled as they passed up the hall to the sitting-room.
He sat on as they had left him in his favorite crumpled-up attitude. After all, it was a good thing the boy did not know, was of the kind who could not be trusted with any information of importance. He did not want Gene or anybody else to interfere. He, Rose’s father, and he alone, without any outside assistance, would reach up and pick out for her any star that sparkled in the heavens, any moon for which she might choose to cry. She wanted Dominick Ryan for her husband. She should have him and it would be her father who would get him for her. He would give her Dominick Ryan, as he would a pearl necklace or a new automobile to which she had taken a fancy.
It whetted the old man’s lust of battle that Dominick was so hard to get. Sitting fallen together in his chair he thought about new ways of approaching Berny, new ways of bribing, or wheedling, or terrifying her into giving up her husband. He was not at the end of his rope yet, by any means. And it lent an added zest to the game that he had an adversary of so much spirit. He was beginning to respect her. Even if he had not been fighting for Rose, he would have gone on with the struggle for its own sake. It was not Bill Cannon’s way to enter a contest, and then be beaten—a contest with a spitfire woman at that.
CHAPTER XXII
OUT OF THE FULLNESS OF THE HEART
That night it was Berny’s turn to be wakeful. In the silence of the sleeping house and the warm darkness of her curtained room, she lay tossing on her bed, hearing the clear, musical striking of the parlor clock as it marked the hours. When the first thin streak of gray painted a pale line between the window curtains she rose and took a sleeping powder and soon after fell into a heavy slumber.