He turned about to look long and steadily at the sleeping girl.
Yes, life surely was strange. Nothing like this had come to him before. As he looked at the perfect repose of that face, something welled up within him.
“She trusts me,” he whispered. Until this moment he had not known that such perfect trust existed in the world. “She trusts me. She believes in me. Her father may be rich. That does not matter. I will neither desert nor betray her. We shall fight it out together, to the bitter end.”
To this serious-minded boy who until this moment had known little of life as it is lived save on the gridiron and in the steel mills, this was a solemn covenant never to be broken.
“But now,” he asked himself, “what is to be done now?”
This problem he thought through with care. “They’re likely to be looking for us,” he told himself. “Yes, their search will be rather a wild one, when they know.” He put a hand to his pocket. Then his face sobered. Had he made a mistake?
“If only we can make a clean get-away they are sunk!” he muttered, clenching his fists. “I am not sorry I took the chance.”
Once again his thoughts returned to the problem at hand. “A step in the snow will betray us,” he told himself. “Now the unmarked snow says we are not here. Better to wait for darkness.”
Having come to this conclusion, he sank deep in his chair and fell fast asleep.
He awoke some hours later to be greeted by the faint aroma of tea brewing and biscuits baking on the hearth.