“Go on, you brute,” he said, angry at himself. “Young a bit for that, isn’t she?” he said in a voice which he strove to make casual.
“Young? Dear boy, don’t you know that she is just two years younger than you or I? She is a finished young lady.”
Paul turned this over in his mind as an astounding bit of information. Peg as a young lady, as one whom a man might desire to marry, was something not only amazing but quite disturbing.
“Is she—are the Pelhams coming back home soon?” he inquired, his mind occupied with the picture of a little girl standing in the moonlight, looking up at him and whispering, “I won’t ever forget, Paul.”
“This winter they come back, I think. At least, if Peg doesn’t get married,” said Adelina, her shrewd eyes searching his face and reading it like an open book.
Paul caught the look, resented it, and closed the open book. But he would talk no more of the Pelhams or of their plans. He listened instead, or appeared to listen, to Adelina’s chatter about Vancouver and the possibilities of a gay life in that young and ambitious city, till they came to the Pine Croft drive.
“You are not listening to me a bit, Paul,” she said, with a pout. “You are thinking of Peg I know,” with a gay laugh, “but you might as well put her out of your mind.”
“Yes,” said Paul gravely, “I might as well put her out of my mind, and every other girl, as far as that is concerned.” He pulled up his horse sharply and swinging his arm to include in its sweep the Pine Croft Ranch, he said with a touch of bitterness in his tone, “I have to make twenty thousand dollars to buy back all that, before I think of anything else.”
“Buy back? From whom, Paul?”
“From—why, don’t you know?—from your father, Adelina.”