Hereupon, Herbert resumed a confused breathing.
Dazed, he remained uneasy, profoundly so: and
gratitude was no part of his emotion. He well
understood that in conflicts such as these Florence
was never susceptible to impulses of compassion; in
fact, if there was warfare between them, experience
had taught him to be wariest when she seemed kindest.
He moved away from her, and went into another room
where his condition was one of increasing mental discomfort,
though he looked over the pictures in his great-uncle’s
copy of “Paradise Lost.” These illustrations,
by M. Gustave Dore, failed to aid in reassuring his
troubled mind.
When Florence left the house, he impulsively accompanied
her, maintaining a nervous silence as they walked
the short distance between Uncle Joseph’s front
gate and her own. There, however, he spoke.
“Look here! You don’t haf to go and
believe everything that ole girl told you, do you?”
“No,” said Florence heartily. “I
don’t haf to.”
“Well, look here,” he urged, helpless
but to repeat. “You don’t haf to
believe whatever it was she went and told you, do you?”
“What was it you think she told me, Herbert?”
“All that guff—you know. Well,
whatever it was you said she told you.”
“I didn’t,” said Florence.
“I didn’t say she told me anything at all.”
“Well, she did, didn’t she?”
“Why, no,” Florence replied, lightly.
“She didn’t say anything to me.
Only I’m glad to have your opinion of
her, how she’s such a story-teller and all—if
I ever want to tell her, and everything!”
But Herbert had greater alarms than this, and the
greater obscured the lesser. “Look here,”
he said, “if she didn’t tell you, how’d
you know it then?”
“How’d I know what?”
“That—that big story about my ever
writin’ I knew I had”—he gulped
again—“pretty eyes.”
“Oh, about that!” Florence said,
and swung the gate shut between them. “Well,
I guess it’s too late to tell you to-night, Herbert;
but maybe if you and that nasty little Henry Rooter
do every single thing I tell you to, and do it just
exackly like I tell you from this time on, why
maybe—I only say ’maybe’—well,
maybe I’ll tell you some day when I feel like
it.”
She ran up the path and up the veranda steps, but
paused before opening the front door, and called back
to the waiting Herbert:
“The only person I’d ever think
of tellin’ about it before I tell you would
be a boy I know.” She coughed, and added
as by an afterthought, “He’d just love
to know all about it; I know he would. So, when
I tell anybody about it I’ll only tell just
you and this other boy.”
“What other boy?” Herbert demanded.
And her reply, thrilling through the darkness, left
him demoralized with horror.
“Wallie Torbin!”
