"You hadn't been saying anything to her—to suggest it?"
Johnny Byrd's face changed unhappily. His sunburned warmth deepened to a brick red.
"Why, no—not about marrying. Oh, hang it all, Barry, don't act as if you never kissed a pretty girl! Oh, she pretended she thought that was proposing to her—just as if a few friendly words and a half kiss meant anything like that. . . . I'll own I was gone on her," Johnny found himself suddenly announcing, "but when she was taking marriage for granted right off it sounded too much like a hold-up and I flared all over."
"A hold-up?"
"Oh, thumb screws, you know—the same old quick-step to the altar. I hadn't done a thing, I tell you, but it looked as if she thought that our being there was something she could stage a scene on and so I thought—you don't know what things have been tried on me before," he broke off to protest at Barry's expression.
Mutteringly he offered, "You other fellows may think you know a little bit about side-stepping girls but when it comes to any kind of a bank roll—they're like starving Armenians at sight of food. I'd had 'em try all sorts of things. . . . But I own, now, she was just going according to her foreign ways. She must have been half scared to death. And she—she is pretty crazy about me——"
"I am not pretty crazy about you, Johnny Byrd!"
The door behind Barry was wrenched from his holding and flung violently open and Maria Angelina appeared upon the threshold, a defiant little image of war. Deadly pale, except for that scarlet stain across her cheek, her eyes blazing, there was something so mortally honest in the indignant anger that possessed her that Johnny Byrd unconsciously fell back a step, and Barry Elder stood aside, his own gaze lit with concern and wonder.
"I am despising you for a coward and a flirter," said Maria Angelina in a low but exceedingly penetrative voice, and so intense was her command of the situation that neither man found humor, then, in the misused word.
"You make love to girls when you mean nothing by it—you get them lost in the woods and then refuse the marriage that any gentleman, even an indifferent gentleman, would offer! And then you behave like a savage. You bully and try to force your way into the actual room of shelter with me!"