"Do you know what I'm used to? It's a boarding house where I live in a little back bedroom, and they call us to meals with a bell."
The humor of this situation entirely failed to appeal to him.
"I also," he said, "have a bell. And it shall be used to call you to dinner, if you wish."
He was so grave that she did not dare to laugh. But for some reason that moment of bantering brought the big fellow much closer to her than he had been before. And when she saw him so docile to her wishes, for all his strength and his mastery, the only thing that kept her from opening her heart to him, and despising the game which she and Connor were playing with him, was the warning of the gambler.
"I've heard a young buck talk to a young squaw—before he married her. The same line of junk!"
Connor must be right. He came from the great city.
But before that ride was over she was repeating that warning very much as Odysseus used the flower of Hermes against the arts of Circe. For the Garden of Eden, as they came back to the house after the circuit, seemed to her very much like a little kingdom, and the monarch thereof was inviting her in dumb-show to be the queen of the realm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
At the house they were met by one of the servants who had been waiting for David to receive from the master definite orders concerning some woodchopping. For the trees of the garden were like children to David of Eden, and he allowed only the ones he himself designated to be cut for timber or fuel. He left the girl with manifest reluctance.