“I wan' to ask you,” said she simply and gravely, “if you know what he is doing.”
Doane moved his head in the negative.
“He has been in his room for more than a day. When I go to his door he is kin' but he doesn' ask me to come in. And he doesn' tell me anything.”
“He is not confiding in me,” said Doane.
“I don' like that, either, Mis'er Doane. For I know he thinks of you now as his closes' frien'. There is no other frien' who knows what you know. An' you have save' his life an' mine. My father is not a man to fail in frien'ship or in gratitu'.”
Doane's eyes, despite his nearly successful inner struggles, grew misty again. Impulsively he took her hand gently in his. At once, simply, her slender fingers closed about his own. It seemed not unlike the trusting affection of a child; he sensed this as a new pain. Yet there was strong emotional quality in her; he felt it in her dark beauty, in the curve of her cheek and the lustrous troubled splendor in her eyes, in the slender curves of her strong young body. She was, after all, a woman grown; aroused, doubtless, to the puzzling facts of life; a woman, with an ardent lover close at hand, who was—this as his wholly adult mind now saw her—already at her mating time. And feeling this he gripped her hand more tightly than he knew. But even so, he was not unaware of his own danger. It wouldn't do; once to release his own tightly chained emotions would be to render himself of no greater value to her in her bewilderment than any merely pursuing male. He set his teeth on that thought, and abruptly withdrew his hand.
She did not look up—her gaze was fixed on the surface of the river. The only indication she gave that she was so much as aware of this odd little act of his was that she started to speak, then paused for a brief instant before going on.
“I ask—ask myself all the time if there is anything we coul' be doing.”
Doane's head moved again in the negative.
“If not even his gratitu'—”