“Then I especially need a protector. I’m going to ask you again to go along with me. Really, you’re needed if I’m expected to stay on my job. Why,” he went on, jest mingling with seriousness in his own case, “if the Flagg drive comes down all right through my efforts, you can take the credit of the victory because you were present to-night and smoothed things; he’ll just have to be decent, with a strange young lady in the room.”
She was not ready with peremptory refusal, as she had been on the other occasion; she had met the bugbear of Rickety Dick and had prevailed over the old man’s suspicions. As Latisan averred, her presence might help matters; she would entertain strange and acute regrets if her absence should allow the split that Latisan seemed to apprehend.
He timidly put his hand on her arm. “Please!”
“I’ll be intruding on a business talk. I may make him all the more touchy.” She was hesitating, weighing the hazards of each plan—to go or to stay away.
“There’s no private business to be talked. I’m simply going to tell him that I have blown the ice and have the logs in the river and I want to have his orders about how many splash dams I can blow up if I need to do it for a head o’ water to beat the Three C’s drive to Skulltree. Really, he needs to talk with somebody who is gentle,” he went on, and she responded to the touch on her arm and walked slowly with him up the hill. “He sits there day by day and reads the tooth-for-tooth part of the Old Testament, and it keeps hardening his heart. I’ve thought of a plan. Suppose you get friendly with him! You can take some soothing books up to him in your off hours and read aloud. Let’s try to make a different man of Eck Flagg, you and I.”
So, over the ledges where her childish feet had stumbled, Lida Kennard, trembling, anxious, yearning for her kin, went again to the door of the big mansion on the hill.
Latisan’s words had opened a vista of hope to her; she might be able, after all, to render the service to which old Dick had exhorted her, hiding her identity behind a woman’s desire to cheer an invalid.
It was the same square, bleak house of her early memories, now dark except for a dim glow through two dingy windows in the lower part; the yee-yawed curtains were eloquent evidence of the housekeeping methods.
“He won’t have any women around, as I told you.” Latisan was not tactful in his excuse for the slack aspect of the house.
“I’m afraid it isn’t best for me to go in,” she said, making a final stand.