“I’ll go as slowly as I can. You can’t get rid of me so.” Thaine was getting control of himself again.
“Say, Thaine, tell me why you go away from our company tonight,” Jo pleaded softly, putting her hand on her companion’s arm. “Don’t you care to come to our house any more?”
They were in the buggy now on the driveway across the lake. Thaine recalled the moonlight hour when he sat with Leigh, of how little Leigh seemed to be thinking of herself, of how he had admired her because she demanded no admiration from him. Was there an obligation demanded 258 here today? And had he given grounds for such obligation? Past question, he had.
“Jo, you must take me just as I am,” he said. “All the boys are ready to crowd into any place I vacate around Cyrus Bennington’s premises. You won’t miss one from your company tonight. I may get desperate—and kill off a few of them sometime to make you really miss me.”
He knew he was talking foolishly. He had felt himself superior to the other young men who obeyed every wish of Jo’s. He had been flattered always by her evident preference for his company, and had not thought of himself as being controlled by her before. He had been too willing to do her bidding. Today, for the first time, her rule was irksome. In spite of his efforts to be agreeable, the drive homeward was not a happy one.
It was twilight when Thaine reached the Cloverdale Ranch and found Leigh waiting for him on the wide porch. All the way down the river he had been calling himself names and letting his conscience stab him unmercifully. And once when something spoke within him, saying, “You never told Jo you were fond of her. You have not done her any wrong,” he stifled back the pleasing voice and despised himself for trying to find such excuse. He was only nineteen and had not had the stern discipline of war that Asher Aydelot had known at the same age.
Jo had offered no further complaint at his refusing her invitation. She played the vastly more effective part of being grieved but not angry, and her quiet good-by was so unlike pretty imperious Jo Bennington that Thaine was tempted to go back and spend the evening in her company. Yet, strangely enough, he did not blame Leigh for 259 being the cause of his discomfort, as he should have done. As he neared her home, his conscience grew less and less noisy, and when he sat at last in Jim Shirley’s easy porch chair with Leigh in a low rocker facing him, while the long summer Sabbath twilight was falling on the peaceful landscape about him, he had almost forgotten Jo’s claim on him.
“Doctor Carey came down to see me,” Leigh was saying, “just as you were kind enough to ask him to do. He told me he had no money of his own to loan, but he knew of a fund he might control in a few days. He had to leave Kansas yesterday on a business trip, but he will see me as soon as he comes back.”
“Better than gold! Your plans just fall together and fit in, don’t they?” Thaine exclaimed. “Will he be back in time, though?”
“Yes. But really, Thaine,” Leigh’s eyes were beautiful in the twilight, “I never should have thought of Doctor Carey if it hadn’t been for you.”