Joe, discovered, grinned sheepishly.
“Thought that looked like your back,”
he said. “Nice evening for a walk, isn’t
it?”
“Let me look at you, Joe,” said Willy
Cameron. “You look strange to me.
Ah, now I have it. You look like a comet without
a tail. Where’s the family?”
“Making taffy. How—is Edith?”
“Doing nicely.” He avoided the boy’s
eyes.
“I guess I’d better tell you. Dan’s
told me about her. I—” Joe
hesitated. Then: “She never seemed
like that sort of a girl,” he finished, bitterly.
“She isn’t that sort of girl, Joe.”
“She did it. How could a fellow know she
wouldn’t do it again?”
“She has had a pretty sad sort of lesson.”
Joe, his real business forgotten, walked on with eyes
down and shoulders drooping.
“I might as well finish with it,” he said,
“now I’ve started. I’ve always
been crazy about her. Of course now—I
haven’t slept for two nights.”
“I think it’s rather like this, Joe,”
Willy Cameron said, after a pause. “We
are not one person, really. We are all two or
three people, and all different. We are bad
and good, depending on which of us is the strongest
at the time, and now and then we pay so much for the
bad we do that we bury that part. That’s
what has happened to Edith. Unless, of course,”
he added, “we go on convincing her that she
is still the thing she doesn’t want to be.”
“I’d like to kill the man,” Joe
said. But after a little, as they neared the
edge of the park, he looked up.
“You mean, go on as if nothing had happened?”
“Precisely,” said Willy Cameron, “as
though nothing had happened.”
The atmosphere of the Cardew house was subtly changed
and very friendly. Willy Cameron found himself
received as an old friend, with no tendency to forget
the service he had rendered, or that, in their darkest
hour, he had been one of them.
To his surprise Pink Denslow was there, and he saw
at once that Pink had been telling them of the night
at the farm house. Pink was himself again, save
for a small shaved place at the back of his head,
covered with plaster.
“I’ve told them, Cameron,” he said.
“If I could only tell it generally I’d
be the most popular man in the city, at dinners.”
“Pair of young fools,” old Anthony muttered,
with his sardonic smile. But in his hand-clasp,
as in Howard’s, there was warmth and a sort of
envy, envy of youth and the adventurous spirit of youth.
Lily was very quiet. The story had meant more
to her than to the others. She had more nearly
understood Pink’s reference to the sealed envelope
Willy Cameron had left, and the help sent by Edith
Boyd. She connected that with Louis Akers, and
from that to Akers’ threat against Cameron was
only a step. She was frightened and somewhat
resentful, that this other girl should have saved him
from a revenge that she knew was directed at herself.
That she, who had brought this thing about, had sat
quietly at home while another woman, a woman who loved
him, had saved him.
