“I can’t figure this out.” He looked at her, doing his best to read her real intentions in her face. “You can’t love him, or why this other fellow? I suppose you count on his father’s forgiveness, but that, if it comes at all, won’t come for years. You can’t wait years; don’t you see that? Your youth is your capital; you would be a fool to squander it, and you don’t look to me like a fool.”
“No, I am not a fool,” she said quietly. “I have certain plans, certain intentions, that mean everything to me. Dick, nor his father, nor you can’t come between me and the life I want. You might help me, any one of you, but you can’t hold me back. I should like to tell you just what it is I do want, but not here, not now. Are you afraid to trust yourself alone with me?”
“Are you laughing at me?”
“Perhaps.”
“What is it that you want me to do?”
“Meet me in half an hour on the shore road, just above the place where we met yesterday; do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“Get out of your head, before you meet me, the thought that I am the sort of woman who can be bought by any man. Until last night no man, in all my life, ever had the right to say that he had been anything to me. Do you believe that?”
“Yes. I can’t doubt it, when you look at me as you look now.”
“And you will be there, in half an hour?”