“A man generally knows the lay of the land. She is pretty free.”
“Free, my God!” Glenn Andrews’ face flashed fire. “You are a liar!”
The next moment the two grappled. A crowd gathered around in wild excitement. Before they could be parted the battle had been fought. With the first lift of his hand, Stephen Kent’s penknife had slipped across and cut the radial artery of Glenn Andrews’ wrist. Regardless of the flow of blood, he had dealt the blow that laid the other at his feet.
CHAPTER II.
It was several days before Glenn felt able to resume his work. He kept away from Esther until he could give himself a chance to recover from the acute anaemia from which he suffered. Finally, when he called, he found that she had left that place, and her address could not be given him.
He was worried and bitterly wounded.
This girl, wild of heart, full of all sorts of emotions, full of unreasoning impulses who had once been easy for him to understand, had gained a complexity and subtlety new to him.
Yet he could do nothing now but treat it as a recurrence of her old fits of childish petulance. If, by some unaccountable chance, there was any finality in this step of hers, and her motive was to break off their old blameless intimacy, he would watch over her from afar. There was no malice in his heart for her. Nobody could make him believe a story, the truth of which would be unworthy of her. Yet the dim, persistent sense of dissatisfaction which he tried so hard to stifle, under a rush of work and recreation, would not vanish. Time, which he filled with the fever of his literary passion, together with keeping in touch with a few old friends, had become so strained, so intense, that in spite of the firm strength he had, the inordinate will, sheer physical weariness conquered, the tense nerves for a time relaxed.
It was in the latter part of April that Richmond Briarley happened to stop in a flower store to order a palm for some friend. At the counter stood a slender girl. There was something very unusual about her or he would not have given her a moment’s thought, nor the second look.
Her hair swept back in deep waves from her brow, under the wide, soft hat. The dark blue of her eyes seemed to gently motion as she looked at the delicate orchids the clerk held across to her.