“Somebody like this new lucky man, McCoy,” suggested Harris, and she smiled complacently but did not answer.
And out on the little creek, sure enough, Lavina and the captain were gliding with the current, and the current had got them into dangerous waters.
“And you won’t say yes, Lavina?” he asked, and she tapped her foot impatiently on the bottom of the boat.
“I told you yes twenty-five years ago, Alf Leek,” she answered.
He sighed helplessly. His old aggressive manner was all gone. The tactics he would adopt for any other woman were useless with this one. She knew him like a book. She had him completely cowed and miserable. No longer did he regale admiring friends with tales of the late war, and incidentally allow himself to be thought a hero. One look from Lavina would freeze the story of the hottest battle that ever was fought.
To be sure, she had as yet refrained from using words against him; but how long would she refrain? That 340 question he had asked himself until, in despair, a loop-hole from her quiet vengeance had occurred to him, and he had asked her to marry him.
“You never could—would marry any one else,” he said, pleadingly.
“Oh, couldn’t I?”
“And I couldn’t, either, Lavina,” he continued, looking at her sentimentally. But Lavina knew better.
“You would, if anybody would have you,” she retorted. “I know I reached here just in time to keep poor Lorena Jane from being made a victim of. You would have been a tyrant over her, with your great pretensions, if I hadn’t stopped it. You always were tyrannical, Alf Leek; and the only time you’re humble as you ought to be is when you meet some one who can tyrannize over you. You are one of the sort that needs it.”