been no one to help her away from them. He
knew he could do it. She had a fine streak in her, and he wanted to
bring it out!

A little frightened, she tried to explain that she was not the marrying
kind. Then, brick-red and bull-necked, he tried to tell her in his
groping Celtic way that he wanted children, that she meant a lot to
him, that he was going to try to make her the happiest woman south of
Harlem.

This had brought into her face a quick and dangerous light which he
found hard to explain. He could see that she was flattered by what he
had said, that his words had made her waywardly happy, that for a
moment, in fact, she had been swept off her feet.

Then dark afterthought interposed. It crept like a cloud across her
abandoned face. It brought about a change so prompt that it disturbed
the Second Deputy.

"You 're--you 're not tied up already, are you?" he had hesitatingly
demanded. "You 're not married?"

"No, I 'm not tied up!" she had promptly and fiercely responded. "My
life 's my own--my own!"

"Then why can't you marry me?" the practical-minded man had asked.

"I could!" she had retorted, with the same fierceness as before. Then
she had stood looking at him out of wistful and unhappy eyes. "I
could--if you only understood, if you could only help me the way I want
to be helped!"

She had clung to his arm with a tragic forlornness that seemed to leave
her very wan and helpless. And he had found it ineffably sweet to
enfold that warm mass of wan helplessness in his own virile strength.

She asked for time, and he was glad to consent to the delay, so long as
it did not keep him from seeing her. In matters of the emotions he was
still as uninitiated as a child. He found himself a little dazed by
the seemingly accidental tenderness, by the promises of devotion, in
which she proved so lavish. Morning by jocund morning he built up his
airy dreams, as carefully as she built up her nut-brown plaits. He
grew heavily light-headed with his plans for the future. When she
pleaded with him never to leave her, never to trust her too much, he
patted her thin cheek and asked when she was going to name the day.
From that finality she still edged away, as though her happiness itself
were only experimental, as though she expected the blue sky above them
to deliver itself of a bolt.

But by this time she had become a habit with him. He liked her even in
her moodiest moments. When, one day, she sug