"Yes; go on. I'm anxious to hear--more anxious than I seem to be, perhaps."

"Well, she is coming West, after a bit. She, and her sister and the mother. Mrs. Brentwood's asthma is worse, and the wise men have ordered her to the interior. I thought you'd like to know."

"Is she--are they coming this way?" asked Kent.

The train was in, and the porter had fetched Loring's hand-bag from the check-stand. The guest paused with one foot on the step of the sleeping-car.

"If I were you, David, I'd write and ask; I should, by Jove. It would be a tremendously cheeky thing to do, of course, having such a slight acquaintance with her as you have; but I'll be hanged if I shouldn't chance it. And in the mean time, if I don't go back East next week, you'll hear from me. When you do, or if you do, take a day off and run up to the capital. I shall need you. Good-by."

Kent watched the train pull out; stood looking after it until the two red eyes of the rear signals had disappeared in the dusty darkness of the illimitable plain. Then he went to his rooms, to the one which was called by courtesy his office, and without allowing himself time for a nice balancing of the pros and cons, squared himself at the desk to write a letter.

III

THE BOSTONIANS

It was precisely on the day set for the Brentwoods' westward flitting that the postman, making his morning round, delivered David Kent's asking at the house in the Back Bay sub-district. Elinor was busy packing for the migration, but she left Penelope and the maid to cope with the problem of compressing two trunkfuls into one while she read the letter, and she was reading it a second time when Mr. Brookes Ormsby's card came up.

"You go, Penelope," she begged. "There is so much to do."

"Not I," said the younger sister, cavalierly; "he didn't come to see me."

Whereupon Elinor smoothed the two small wrinkles of impatience out of her brow, tucked her letter into her bosom, and went down to meet the early morning caller.

Mr. Brookes Ormsby, club-man, gentleman of athletic leisure, and inheritor of the Ormsby millions, was pacing back and forth before the handful of fire in the drawing-room grate when she entered.

"You don't deserve to have a collie sheep-dog friend," he protested reproachfully. "How was I to know that you were going away?"

Another time Elinor might have felt that she owed him an explanation, but just now she was careful, and troubled about the packing.

"How was I to know you didn't know?" she retorted. "It was in the _Transcript_."

"Well!" said Ormsby. "Things have come to a pretty pa.s.s when I have to keep track of you through the society column. I didn't see the paper.

Dyckman brought me word last night at Vineyard Haven, and we broke a propeller blade on the _Amphitrite_ trying to get here in time."

"I am so sorry--for the _Amphitrite_," she said. "But you are here, and in good season. Shall I call mother and Nell?"

"No. I ran out to see if I'm in time to do your errands for you--take your tickets, and so on."

"Oh, we shouldn't think of troubling you. James can do all those things.

And failing James, there is a very dependable young woman at the head of this household. Haven't I 'personally conducted' the family all over Europe?"

"James is a base hireling," said the caller, blandly. "And as for the capable young woman: do I or do I not recollect a dark night on the German frontier when she was glad enough to call on a sleepy fellow pilgrim to help her wrestle with a particularly thick-headed customs officer?"

"If you do, it is not especially kind of you to remind her of it."

He looked up quickly, and the masterful soul of the man, for which the clean-cut, square-set jaw and the athletic figure were the outward presentments, put on a mask of deference and humility.

"You are hard with me, Elinor--always flinty and adamantine, and that sort. Have you no soft side at all?"

She laughed.

"The sentimental young woman went out some time ago, didn't she? One can't be an anachronism."

"I suppose not. Yet I'm always trying to make myself believe other things about you. Don't you like to be cared for like other women?"

"I don't know; sometimes I think I should. But I have had to be the man of the house since father died."

"I know," he said. "And it is the petty anxieties that have made you put the woman to the wall. I'm here this morning to save you some of them; to take the man's part in your outsetting, or as much of it as I can. When are you going to give me the right to come between you and all the little worries, Elinor?"

She turned from him with a faint gesture of cold impatience.

"You are forgetting your promise," she said quite dispa.s.sionately. "We were to be friends; as good friends as we were before that evening at Bar Harbor. I told you it would be impossible, and you said you were strong enough to make it possible."

He looked at her with narrowing eyes.

"It is possible, in a way. But I'd like to know what door of your heart it is that I haven't been able to open."

She ignored the pleading and took refuge in a woman's expedient.

"If you insist on going back to the beginnings, I shall go back, also--to Abigail and the trunk-packing."

He planted himself squarely before her, the mask lifted and the masterful soul a.s.serting itself boldly.

"It wouldn't do any good, you know. I am going with you."

"To Abigail and the trunk-room?"

"Oh, no; to the jumping-off place out West--wherever it is you are going to hibernate."

"No," she said decisively; "you must not."

"Why?"

"My saying so ought to be sufficient reason."

"It isn't," he contended, frowning down on her good-naturedly. "Shall I tell you why you don't want me to go? It is because you are afraid."

"I am not," she denied.

"Yes, you are. You know in your own heart there is no reason why you should continue to make me unhappy, and you are afraid I might over-persuade you."

Her eyes--they were the serene eyes of cool gray that take on slate-blue tints in stressful moments--met his defiantly.

"If you think that, I withdraw my objection," she said coldly. "Mother and Penelope will be delighted, I am sure."

"And you will be bored, world without end," he laughed. "Never mind; I'll be decent about it and keep out of your way as much as you like."