“Not now!” he savagely commanded himself. “Not now!”
She appeared to be thinking of something she had to say, and her first words rendered him thankful that he had held his tongue, otherwise he might never have known the depths of the girl seated there by his side.
“I don’t want you to think me forward,” she said quietly; “but I have wanted for the last two days to ask you something. It makes it easier now that I know you know, that––that I care for it. What are your––your––how are your finances?”
She had stammered it out at last, and, now that the conversation had been led in that direction, he could speak. He sat there quietly, as if by a comrade, and told her all. Told her of his boyhood, his father’s death, and that he, in his own right, had nothing in the world but youth and a half-ownership in the Croix d’Or, which threatened 232 to prove worthless. He voiced that dread of wasting his backer’s money when he had none of his own to put with it, meeting dollar for dollar as it was thrown into the crucibles of fate. He stopped at last, a little ashamed of having so completely unbosomed himself, for he was by habit and nature reticent.
“You have made it a great deal easier for me,” she said, with an assumption of gayety. “I can say what I’ve been thinking of for two days without spludging all over my words.”
She laughed as if in recollection of her previous embarrassment, and again became seriously grave, and went on:
“They say my father is a hard man. At times I have been led to believe it; but he has been a good father to me, and I appreciate it and his worries more, after a four years’ absence in an Eastern school, and––well, perhaps because I am so much older now, and better able to judge leniently. I have never known much of his business from his lips. It is one subject on which he is not exactly loquacious, as probably you know.”
Again she laughed a little, grim laugh. Dick had opened his lips to say that he had never met her father, when she continued:
“On the day I met you first, up here by your pipe line, the day you almost ended my bright young career by starting a half-ton bowlder down the hill––don’t interrupt with repeated apologies, please––I had my birth anniversary. I was twenty-one, and––my own boss.”