"Nothing I'd like better," answered Jack promptly.
"We'll arrange a date later. Just now I've got to beat it. Goin' drivin' with a lady."
Jack scored for once. "She's a good scout, too."
"If she isn't, I'll say there never was one," his cousin assented.
CHAPTER XLII
THE NEW WORLD
Kirby took his lady love driving in a rented flivver. It was a
Colorado night, with a young moon looking down through the cool, rare
atmosphere found only in the Rockies. He drove her through the city to
Berkeley and up the hill to Inspiration Point.
They talked only in intermittent snatches. Rose had the gift of comradeship. Her tongue never rattled. With Kirby she did not need to make talk. They had always understood each other without words.
But to-night their silences were filled with new and awkward significances. She guessed that an emotional crisis was at hand. With all her heart she welcomed and shrank from it. For she knew that after to-night life could never be the same to her. It might be fuller, deeper, happier, but it could not hold for her the freedom she had guarded and cherished.
At the summit he killed the engine. They looked across the valley to the hills dimmed by night's velvet dusk.