"Jock, I want you to meet a good angel," he said quickly. He stretched out his hand, taking hers, and turned proudly: "This is Miss Baxter—Dodo. We are engaged to be married."
Jock Lindaberry's face at once lost the peculiar undecided stare it had borne. He stepped forward, bending over her hand with a trace of the old-fashioned courtesy that sat so naturally on Garry.
But the slight trace of awkwardness which had attended the explanation, a fugitive sensitive thought that Garry had said what he had to save the situation,—out of noblesse oblige,—had shocked Doré in her independent soul. She felt a sudden anger at the invalid, at the doctor who was a spectator, and at the brother who had made such an excuse a social necessity.
"Mr. Lindaberry is quite wrong!" she said hotly. "And his explanation is totally uncalled for, whatever his motives! We are not engaged. I have never promised to marry him, and I do not need any such excuse to account for my being here. Mr. Lindaberry and Doctor Lampson both know what my motives are, and I consider them quite honorable enough to need no apology. Good day!"
Before she could be prevented, deaf to the entreaties of Lindaberry or the expostulations of his brother, she walked out, in a fine temper.
Lindaberry did not understand in the least the motive of her revolt. He rather ascribed it to a refusal on her part to commit herself. The next day, when she came, he stammered out:
"Dodo, look here. You don't understand! I'm not taking things for granted—I meant what I said. You're bound to nothing. What I—"
But she laid her hand across his lips, frowning.
"We won't discuss it!"
The evening came when Garry, still with a touch of weakness in voice and in complexion, was ready to go off for a month in the open with Doctor Lampson—a hunting trip in the clarifying wilds of snow-ridden Canada on the track of moose: a month in which to fight the first battles against old habits, with the strength of a devoted friend at his side, far from old associations, nightmares of interminable electric lights and the battering, nerve-tiring hammer of New York. He had come doggedly out of the shadow, fortified by the inspiration a great love had raised in him. Not that the fight was easy: on the contrary, alone he never would have conquered. He loved, and he felt resurrected. He had no fear of the test. The old manhood, sharp and decisive, returned. Sometimes, when, on a sleepless night, he had gone trudging, in greatcoat and boots, for miles across frozen sleeping blocks, he would return to her home, gazing up at her window with the adoration of the Magi. For him she was the purest spirit that could exist, without evil—without even the power to perceive ugliness.