"Yes."
"I think it's horrid. Who was that?"
He told her. She winced, but he continued, "My father's given name was Buck. He was a giant of a man, and he was my boyhood's ideal of what a man should be—naturally. I wanted to be named for him; I went without a name until I was nine. So they called me 'Little Buck.'"
"You told me that your people——"
"Were upright and honorable in their way," Mason cut in gloomily. "As I knew them, they were, certainly. I've never been back there. I had to study almost day and night, because I started to school so late. I—I guess I was so much interested in myself that I forgot them."
"And you didn't know until just now," pointedly, "that you had a brother in jail?"
"I've been out of town for three weeks, Alice, you'll remember," he muttered. "I came home only yesterday."
"Well," frowning, "what's the good of going over it? You can't expect me to marry you when you've got a brother in jail, here under our very noses. Honestly, can you?"
She held out to him the diamond ring he had given her an hour before. He accepted it mechanically, and mechanically put it into his pocket. Without another word, she went rapidly toward the house.
Arnold Mason, Little Buck Wolfe that was, walked slowly, with no clear thought as to direction, up the shadowy street. If there is anything that can change the gold of goodness in the mountain heart to iron, it is—this.