“Now-time is good-time,” he said. “Well, I guess you’ve savveyed just who it is and what’s the matter. It’s—it’s Miss Gray—Eleanor Gray.”
To the end of her days, Kate Waddington remembered to be thankful for a certain cotton-tail rabbit. At that moment precisely, this fearling of the woods streaked down the trail, pursued by a dog whose heavy crashing sounded in the distance; came out upon them, 142 whirled with a loud roaring of fern and leaves, screamed the heart-rending scream of a frightened rabbit, and dashed off into the wood. The sound, coming in this tender moment, betrayed Bert Chester into a guilty start. So, when he looked back, her face was as smoothly beautiful as ever and she was even smiling.
“You lucky boy!” she said. And then, “I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t blame any man.” Bertram fairly glowed.
“I knew you’d agree with me,” he said. “Say, what chance do I stand—honest, what do you believe she thinks of me?”
“Honest, I never heard her say. It is likely she hasn’t begun to think of it at all. Women are slower than men about such things. How long have you been—in love with her?”
“Of course, I’ve been that way ever since I saw her first—ever since I was a student, picking prunes for her uncle, and went down and helped her run a bull off her place. I thought then that I never saw nicer eyes or a more ladylike girl. She’s always given me the glassy eye. I think she hates me—no, it 143 isn’t that, either. She just feels superior to me.”
“Oh, perhaps not that!”
“Well, anyhow, I was in college and any one girl looked about the same to me as any other—” Bertram wrinkled his brows in contempt for his utter, undeveloped youngness of two years before—“but I remembered her always. When I saw her sitting in the Hotel Marseillaise that evening, I felt queer; and after I called on her I just knew I had it. Funny, you coming in that afternoon. You and I have hit it off so well, and here I’m confiding in you! It was a regular luck sign, I think.”
Kate’s voice, when she spoke, fell to its deeper, richer tones.
“And I’m sure I feel flattered—any girl would. I really thank you—you don’t know how much.”