“Bueno,” he shrugged. “Though minutes will be ages!”
Her hand was still in his. After raising it to his lips, he swung his beast, with a wave of the hand at Gordon in the distance, galloped off to the north.
His departure left her free to review the situation—with little satisfaction. From every angle one fact stood out—in a moment of pique she had engaged herself to a man who, no matter what might have been, she now knew she could never love. Of course it was possible to break it. But even in her desperation she never thought of that.
“You flirted with him,” she berated herself. “Led him on to an avowal; accepted him out of spite. You are a mean, despicable, miserable thing, and now you’ll go through with it.”
It never occurred to her that, being so “mean and despicable” it might be against Ramon’s interest to inflict herself upon him. Having, with her girl’s illogic, made up her mind, she felt that peculiar sense of comfort which men obtain from duty done and women from self-sacrifice. She turned and looked back to see how that other criminal—the chief, if unconscious, cause of it all—was getting along; and though he was too far away for her to read his face, his bent head revealed a comforting dejection.
As a matter of fact, he was just as miserable as—as she could have wished him to be. At first his thoughts and feelings had run in a personal groove. At one fell swoop certain excursions into Java forests and to the Chinese Wall, not to mention other desirable and lovely places, had been swept into the discard of broken dreams. Never would tropical sunbeams break down through giant fronds to twine that golden aureole about a certain head! In consideration of his recent awakening to her values as a traveling companion, he was just as sore and silly and jealous as any young man could possibly be. And just as her reflections had, in womanly fashion, turned to self-sacrifice, so his rose, in masculine style, to high, moral grounds.
“It’s a damn shame!” he told himself. “Ramon seems a good sort, but—no greaser is good enough for her!” While the bright, hard specks floated up in his eye, he added, “And it isn’t going to be.”
For a while he entertained a notion to catch up and cleanse himself by open confession. But realizing that two glasses of anisette plus a vagrant inclination—even if the latter were based on a sense of injury—might not appeal to her woman’s logic, he kept his distance. Metaphorically, a quarter-mile of misery stretched between them, across which the dejected droop of her shoulders, his hanging head, wirelessed their hopelessness.
“Poor girl!” he pitied her.
“He’s feeling terribly,” she told herself, with mournful satisfaction.