"I knew it," he said humbly. "Only I don't understand.... There's this to say for your brother, that the husband of the woman you fear your brother is learning to love doesn't seem to be trying to hold her love. I don't understand Cockney Aikens. I believe he's white, but—but here we treat women differently."
"That's what started it, I think," she said sadly. "Amos pitied her—as you and I did.... And there are other things.... I can't tell you all—everything that worries me."
"Then it's your duty——" He was about to tell her that she should take her brother away, but he was not unselfish enough for that.
"I can't," she replied, as if he had finished the sentence. "He wouldn't come—he couldn't."
They had turned back and were approaching the ranch-house.
"May I—talk things over a little like this with you when I'm worried, Mr. Stamford?"
Even as his heart leaped, he recognised the subtle way she had armed herself against him by the petition. Never was he to permit himself to take advantage of her confidence. When he would say to her the thing which he now knew he would some day say, he must make his own opening.
"I understand," he murmured. "You may say anything you like. If I can help you—that will be enough for me—now."
Mary Aikens and Professor Bulkeley, left to themselves, with cookie in the kitchen fussing over the dinner, looked out to the sunlit silences where the other two had gone, and responded to their appeal. They saw the two lovers sauntering down toward the river, and they chose the trail up the slope. Slowly they climbed the grade, saying nothing. From the cook-house door Imp thrust his nose, sniffed with half-shut eyes into the drooping sun, and decided that one of his half-formed barks befitted the occasion. Then, satisfied that he had done all that could be expected of him, he trotted back and lay on one of Dakota's feet.
The foreman was sneering through the doorway.