"You seem to forget that I'm mistress here while you're merely a guest! I hate to say it, but you're in serious danger of becoming a nuisance."
"You're not resentful and hateful enough yet to frighten me away.
| 'He either fears his fate too much, |
| Or his deserts are small, |
| That dares not put it to the touch |
| To gain or lose it all.' |
"It's a fact we can't escape from that you and I are not free agents and we haven't been from the very moment we met at May's house. And the lines converge here; you've got to admit that!"
"But they lead away again in quite opposite directions. It is cruel of you to insist—"
"I insist that I love you! That's the only thing that matters!"
"Except," she corrected, "your cheerful assumption that I reciprocate the feeling, when—"
"Let me begin all over again," he interrupted hastily. "You must realize that all the odd happenings that followed our meeting in Washington have come out pretty well; only this little affair of ours—"
"You call it an affair! Calamity would be a better term for it."
This silenced him for some time. Tradition held that the trail they followed was an inheritance from Indian times; it was like an ineffaceable line drawn in the forest by the red men in assertion of their permanent title to the soil.