“It is hard to ask you, Larry—though I know it shouldn’t be—but have you a few dollars that you could give me?”
The man smiled happily. “All that is mine is yours, and, as it happens, I have two or three bills in my wallet. Is there anything you wish to buy?”
Hetty glanced down, flushing, at the bedraggled dress. “Larry,” she said softly. “I couldn’t marry you like this. I haven’t one dollar in my pocket—and I am coming to you with nothing, dear.”
The smile faded out of Larry’s eyes. “I scarcely dare remember all that you have given up for me! And if you had taken Clavering or one of the others you would have ridden to your wedding with a hundred men behind you, as rich as a princess.”
Hetty, sitting, jaded and bespattered, on the limping horse, flashed a swift glance at him, and smiled out of slightly misty eyes.
“It happened,” she said, “that I was particular, or fanciful, and there was only one man—the one that would take me without a dollar, in borrowed clothes—who seemed good enough for me.”
They rode on past a stockyard, and into a rutted street of bare frame houses, and Hetty was glad they scarcely met anybody. Then, Larry helped her down, and, thrusting a wallet into her hands, knocked at the door of a house beside a store. The man who opened it stared at them, and when Larry had drawn him aside called his wife. She took Hetty’s chilled hand in both her own, and the storekeeper smiled at Larry.
“You come right along and put some of my things on,” he said. “Then, you are going with me to have breakfast at the hotel, and talk to the judge. I guess the women aren’t going to have any use for us.”
It was some time later when they came back to the store, and for just a minute Grant saw Hetty alone. She was dressed very plainly in new garments, and blushed when he looked gravely down on her.
“That dress is not good enough for you,” he said. “It is very different from what you have been accustomed to.”