“‘No?’ I—”
“Yes, ‘no!’” broke in the relentless machinery. It ground on implacable, though great beads stood on Andy’s brow from sheer terror lest he run down before the end. “No! as firmly, as emphatically as you said it to me last night. Indeed, I honor you the more for flatly refusing the man who, in forgetting his self-respect, forgot his respect—for you! But, Miss Rose, while I pledge you my honor never, never to speak to you again of love, I may still be—your friend!”
The bays were bowling down the street again by this time; when another kismet, in small and ugly canine form, flew at their heads with yelp and snarl. Rearing with one impulse, the spirited pair lunged forward and flew past the now twinkling lamps in a wild gallop. Andy pulled them down at last; their swinging trot replacing the dangerous rush. The Wood mansion was almost in sight; but the Ancient Mariner was a tyro to Andy Browne in the way he fixed that off-horse’s right ear with stony stare.
He might have looked round in perfect safety. The lithe figure by him sat gracefully erect. The face a trifle pale; the lips set tight against each other, with the blood pressed out of them, were not unnatural in that cutting wind. The eyes, fixed straight ahead, as his own, gleamed gray and cold; only a half-closing of the lids, once or twice, hiding an ugly light reflecting through them from the busy brain behind. But Andy never turned once until he brought up the bays stock still and leaped down to offer his hand to the lady at her own door.
She took it, naturally; springing to the ground as lightly as any débutante of the season. Not one trace of annoyance, even, showed on that best educated face.
“Andy, we are old friends,” she said, offering her hand frankly.
He took it mechanically, with a dazed soft of feeling that he must be even a bigger fool than he felt himself.
“Real friends,” Miss Wood went on, pleasantly, “and I’ll prove it to you now. You have acted like a man of honor to me; I will betray one little confidence, and make two people happy!”
The man still stood dumb; and his eye furtively wandered to the pawing off-horse, as if to take his confidence as to what it meant. 193 The woman’s next words came slowly, and she smiled; a strange smile the lips alone made, but in which the glinting gray eyes took no share.
“For Van Morris is your best friend, after all. He will remember that I told him, last night, ‘One cannot be too careful’!”