“But I’m a terrible mess to meet a girl!” he exclaimed uneasily, looking down deprecatingly at himself. “I thought it was just you. This uniform’s three sizes too large, and needs a drink. Besides,” he passed a speculative hand over his smoothly shaven chin, “I—don’t care for girls!” There was a deep frown between his eyes, and the bitter look had come back on his face. Miss Marilla thought he looked as if he might be going to run away.
“Oh, that’s all right!” said Miss Marilla anxiously. “Neither does Mary Amber like men. She says they’re all a selfish conceited lot. You needn’t have much to do with her. Just eat your dinner and tell anything you want to about the war. We won’t bother you to talk much. Come; this is the house, and the turkey must be on the table getting cold by now.”
She swung open the gate, and laid a persuasive hand on the shabby sleeve; and the young man reluctantly followed her up the path to the front door.
CHAPTER II
When Lyman Gage set sail for France three years before, he left behind him a modest interest in a promising business enterprise, a girl who seemed to love him dearly, and a debt of several thousand dollars to her father, who had advised him to go into the enterprise and furnished the funds for his share in the capital.
When he had returned from France three days before, he had been met with news that the business enterprise had gone to smash during the war, the girl had become engaged to a dashing young captain with a well-feathered nest, and the debt had become a galling yoke.
“Father says, tell you you need not worry about the money you owe him,” wrote the girl sweetly, concluding her revelations. “You can pay it at your leisure when you get started again.”
Lyman Gage lost no time in gathering together every cent he could scrape up. This was more than he had at first hoped, because of the fact that he owned two houses in the big city in which he had landed; and these houses, though old and small, happened to be located in the vicinity of a great industrial plant that had sprung up since the end of the war, and houses were going at soaring prices. They were snapped up at once at a sum that was fabulous in comparison with their real value. This, with what he had brought home and the bonus he received on landing, exactly covered his indebtedness to the man who was to have been his father-in-law; and, when he turned away from the window where he had been telegraphing the money to his lawyer in a far State with instructions to pay the loan at once, he had just forty-six cents left in his pocket.