Kate sighed. She had no answer. She knew all that lay behind the man’s passionate appeal. She knew, too, that he spoke the truth. She knew that the only reason he made any effort at all was because his devotion to herself was something just a shade stronger than this awful disease with which he was afflicted.
The hopelessness of the position for a moment almost overwhelmed her. She knew that she had no love—love such as he required—to give him in return. And when that finally became patent to him away would go the last vestige of self-restraint, and his fall would be headlong.
She knew his early story, and it was a pitiful one. She knew he was born of good parents, rich parents, in New York, that he was well educated. He had been brought up to become an artist, and therein had lain the secret of his fall. In Paris, and Rome, and other European cities, he had first tasted the dregs of youthful debauchery, and disaster had promptly set in. Then, after his student days, had come the final break. His parents abandoned him as a ne’er-do-well, and, setting him up as a rancher in a small way, had sent him out west, another victim of that over-indulgence which helps to populate the fringes of civilization.
The moment was a painful one, and Helen was quick to perceive her sister’s distress. She came to her rescue with an effort at lightness. But her pretty eyes had become very gentle.
She turned to the man who had just taken a letter from his pocket.
“Tell us some more about Big Brother Bill,” she said, with the pretense of a sigh. Then, with a little daring in her manner: “Do you think he’ll like me? Because if he don’t I’ll sure go into mourning, and order my coffin, and bury me on the hillside with my face to the beautiful east—where I come from.”
The man’s moment of passionate discontent had passed, and he smiled into the girl’s questioning eyes in his gentle fashion.
“He’ll just be crazy about you, Helen,” he said. “Say, when he gets his big, silly blue eyes on to you in that swell suit, why, he’ll just hustle you right off to the parson, and you’ll be married before you get a notion there’s such a whirlwind around Rocky Springs.”
“Is he—such a whirlwind?” the girl demanded with appreciation.
“He surely is,” the man asserted definitely.