"But the women themselves—you find them interesting?"
"Oh, yes; some of them. Mrs. Dysart, for instance. As soon as she learned I had no mother, she invited me to a mothers' meeting. I thought that very interesting."
"Very sensible, too. They are mostly childless mothers, and a sprinkling of motherless children will add zest to the assemblage."
They both laughed, and the young man's laugh ended in a cough. The girl glanced uneasily toward the bank of fog that was sweeping across the valley.
"Mr. Palmerston," she said, "the fog is driving in very fast, and it is growing quite damp and chilly. I think you ought to go home. Wait a minute," she added, hurrying into the tent and returning with a soft gray shawl. "I am afraid you will be cold; let me put this about your shoulders."
She threw it around him and pinned it under his chin, standing in front of him with her forehead on a level with his lips.
"Now hurry!"
A man does not submit to the humiliation of having a shawl pinned about his shoulders without questioning his own sanity, and some consciousness of this fact forced itself upon Palmerston as he made his way along the narrow path through the greasewood. He had removed the obnoxious drapery, of course, and was vindicating his masculinity by becoming very cold and damp in the clammy folds of the fog which had overtaken him; but the shawl hung upon his arm and reminded him of many things—not altogether unpleasant things, he would have been obliged to confess if he had not been busy assuring himself that he had no confession to make. He had done his duty, he said to himself; but there was something else which he did not dare to say even to himself—something which made him dissatisfied with his duty now that it was done. Of course he did not expect her to care about his engagement, but she should have been sympathetic; well-bred women were always sympathetic, he argued, arriving at his conclusion by an unanswerable transposition of adjectives. He turned his light coat collar up about his throat, and the shawl on his arm brushed his cheek warmly. No man is altogether colorblind to the danger-signals of his own nature. Did he really want her to care, after all? he asked himself angrily. He might have spared himself the trouble of telling her. She was absorbed in herself, or, what was the same, in that unsavory fraud whom she called father. The young man unfastened the flap of his tent nervously, and took himself in out of the drenching mist, which seemed in some way to have got into his brain. He was angry with himself for his interest in these people, as he styled them in his lofty self-abasement. They were ungrateful, unworthy. His eye fell upon two letters propped up on his table in a manner so conspicuous as to suggest a knowledge of his preoccupation—as if some one were calling him out of his reverie in an offensively loud voice. He turned the address downward, and busied himself in putting to rights the articles which John had piled up to attract his tardy notice. He would read his letters, of course, but not in his present mood: that would be a species of sacrilege, he patronizingly informed his restive conscience.
And he did read them later, after he had carefully folded the gray shawl and placed it out of his range of vision—half a score of closely written pages filled with gentle girlish analysis of the writer's love and its unique manifestations, and ending with a tepid interest in the "queer people" among whom her lover's lot was cast. "It is very hard, my dear," she wrote, "to think of you in that lonely place, cut off from everybody and everything interesting; but we must bear it bravely, since it is to make you strong and well."
Palmerston held the letter in his hand, and looked steadily through the tent window across the sea of fog that had settled over the valley.