“Funny. I don’t remember you. Besides, I don’t know your name—people mumble so when they introduce a man.”
“I’m Ruhannah Carew.”
“Carew,” he repeated, while a crease came between 41 his eyebrows. “Of Brookhollow–– Oh, I know! Your father is the retired missionary—red house facing the bridge.”
“Yes.”
“Certainly,” he said, taking another look at her; “you’re the little girl daddy and I used to see across the fields when we were shooting woodcock in the willows.”
“I remember you,” she said.
“I remember you!”
She coloured gratefully.
“Because,” he added, “dad and I were always afraid you’d wander into range and we’d pepper you from the bushes. You’ve grown a lot, haven’t you?” He had a nice, direct smile though his speech and manners were a trifle breezy, confident, and sans façon. But he was at that age—which succeeds the age of bumptiousness—with life and career before him, attainment, realisation, success, everything the mystery of life holds for a young man who has just flung open the gates and who takes the magic road to the future with a stride instead of his accustomed pace.
He was already a man with a profession, and meant that she should become aware of it.