“Yes,” said Mary Louise softly. “Maybe I speak to you partly because I know about your Uncle Jim, because I think it is so splendid of you to take the responsibility of paying the checks he forged.”
“You can’t know that I took your car that night just to take him to the junction. He came to me to help him and I had to. But, oh, Mary Louise, when Crocker came and I had to hide your car—at least let me tell you what I suffered at the thought of worrying you! I don’t ask your forgiveness.”
Mary Louise found her voice again. “You don’t have to,” she told Danny. “I know, too, of all the trouble you took to push it back safely,” and she turned to him a face so lighted with trust and confidence that Danny gripped the idle steering wheel very hard and gazed straight ahead unseeing into the night.
If he had been observant, he would have noticed that the storm had spent its wildness and was already dying down in the distance. The cool, cleared air was creeping into the car. It was Mary Louise who first saw the new-washed moon appear a golden ball again.
“See, it’s all clearing up,” she said; “we’d better go.”
Danny lingered though for a minute longer. Then—“Mary Louise, may I ask you—” he started to say; then changed it joyously to—“Why, no; I know you won’t give Uncle Jim away to Crocker.”
“Of course not,” replied Mary Louise, and her eyes answered the steady look of his.
Then Danny started the auto slowly and drove out into the lane.