“I’d love her so hard she’d just have to give in. I’d—”
But further revelations were just then cut off. Back in the bedroom her mother had remembered the possibilities of that small, frank tongue. Answering her call, Betty ran off, leaving Gordon, however, with plentiful food for thought.
During the last two months he had seen Lee—riding the range, a pretty lad; presiding at meals, a still prettier girl, excessively feminine in her care for himself and the Three; mothering her brown retainers; a girl clean of mind, clear-eyed, wholesome as a breath of wind off the sage. Yet, somehow, she had not stirred his pulses. He acknowledged it with a touch of shame. What the deuce could be the matter? Was there something wrong with his head?
Presently he gained an inkling—he had been wearing another’s colors! She whom adventure claims has eyes for none else. The color and romance of this land had fired his imagination, opened a whole world to his view. Coral isles of the Pacific, palm-fringed and begirt with thundering surf; copra and pearls, magic words; the head-hunters of the Solomons; deep forests, quaint grass villages of Java and Borneo; the inland rivers of China; Siberian steppes; rock temples of Tibet—these and a thousand other names and places had juggled their terms in his brain. Some day he would see them all, following adventure’s trail!
He had calculated to go it alone, but now began to wonder if that were really necessary. A sympathetic companion doubles one’s joy in beautiful things! Come to think of it—Lee would fit very nicely in a Java forest! He saw her fair hair, a golden aureole, shining in the dusk under giant tropical fronds. She looked well, too, at the tiller of the gasolene-launch in which he was wont to explore, in imagination, the upper waters of the Hoang-ho! Now she was clasping her hands and holding her breath in pleasure and awe at first sight of the Chinese Wall dragging its massive stone coils over mountain and plain. Indeed, in the course of the next half-hour they two explored the major part of the earth’s fair surface, and not a place in it all where Lee did not belong.
Subconsciously, propinquity and isolation had worked their customary effects. If not actually in love, the young man was in a highly dangerous, not to say inflammable, state of mind when, in the midst of his dreamings, the weathered-oak door at the end of the corredor swung in and there, framed in its golden arch, bathed and powdered and fresh, stood that flower of the ages, a modern girl!
It cannot be denied that, given a decent superstructure, it’s the feathers that make the bird. Lines that not only stood the test of, but actually triumphed over, Lee’s severe man’s riding-clothes, took a billowy softness from a pretty voile gown. The silk orange stockings under the ruffle harmonized with a narrow orange and black stripe in the dress. The riband that bound her yellow curls in a girlish coiffure rhymed again with a silk sweater of peacock-blue. A pair of white pumps, that ran like frightened mice under the skirt completed a costume which, without understanding, Gordon knew to be in excellent taste.
“Why, Sister!” he returned her greeting of the morning. “What killing clothes!”
“Right, Brother!” she answered, in kind. “That’s what they’re for.”
Of course he threw up his hands. And of course she laughed. And of course there was more of the perfectly foolish, but perfectly necessary, badinage with which callow youth imitates its elders’ wit. But under all, behind his glow of admiration, Lee sensed new feeling. And she reacted to it—though not altogether in a way that suited the widow, who had followed her out. For if her color heightened, the dangerous gleam still sparkled in her eye.