A Fool For Love | Page 6

Boston art.
"Speaking of art, Mr. Winton, will you tell me how you came to think
of sketching in the mountains of Colorado at this time of year? I should
think the cold would be positively prohibitive of anything like that."
Winton stared--open-mouthed, it is to be feared.
"I--I beg your pardon," he stammered, with the inflection which takes
its pitch from blank bewilderment.
Miss Virginia was happy. Dilettante he might be, and an unhumbled
man of the world as well; but, to use the Reverend Billy's phrase, she
could make him "sit up."
"I beg yours, I'm sure," she said demurely. "I didn't know it was a craft
secret."
Winton looked across the aisle to the table where the Technologian was
sitting opposite a square-shouldered, ruddy-faced gentleman with fiery
eyes and fierce white mustaches, and shook a figurative fist.
"I'd like to know what Adams has been telling you," he said.
"Sketching in the mountains in midwinter! that would be decidedly
original, to say the least of it. And I think I have never done an original
thing in all my life."
For a single instant the brown eyes looked their pity for him; generic
pity it was, of the kind that mounting souls bestow upon the stagnant.

But the subconscious lover in Winton made it personal to him, and it
was the lover who spoke when he went on.
"That is a damaging admission, is it not? I am sorry to have to make
it--to have to confirm your poor opinion of me."
"Did I say anything like that?" she protested.
"Not in words; but your eyes said it, and I know you have been
thinking it all along. Don't ask me how I know it: I couldn't explain it if
I should try. But you have been pitying me, in a way--you know you
have."
The brown eyes were downcast. Frank and free-hearted after her kind
as she was, Virginia Carteret was finding it a new and singular
experience to have a man tell her baldly at their first meeting that he
had read her inmost thought of him. Yet she would not flinch or go
back.
"There is so much to be done in the world, and so few to do the work,"
she pleaded in extenuation.
"And Adams has told you that I am not one of the few? It is true
enough to hurt."
She looked him fairly in the eyes. "What is lacking, Mr. Winton--the
spur?"
"Possibly," he rejoined. "There is no one near enough to care, or to say
'Well done!'"
"How can you tell?" she questioned musingly. "It is not always
permitted to us to hear the plaudits or the hisses--happily, I think. Yet
there are always those standing by who are ready to cry 'Io triumphe!'
and mean it, when one approves himself a good soldier."
The coffee had been served, and Winton sat thoughtfully stirring the
lump of sugar in his cup. Miss Carteret was not having a monopoly of

the new experiences. For instance, it had never before happened to John
Winton to have a woman, young, charming, and altogether lovable,
read him a lesson out of the book of the overcomers.
He smiled inwardly and wondered what she would say if she could
know to what battlefield the drumming wheels of the Limited were
speeding him. Would she be loyal to her mentorship and tell him he
must win, at whatever the cost to Mr. Somerville Darrah and his
business associates? Or would she, womanlike, be her uncle's partizan
and write one John Winton down in her blackest book for daring to
oppose the Rajah?
He assured himself it would make no jot of difference if he knew. He
had a thing to do, and he was purposed to do it strenuously, inflexibly.
Yet in the inmost chamber of his heart, where the barbarian ego stands
unabashed and isolate and recklessly contemptuous of the moralities
minor and major, he saw the birth of an influence which inevitably
must henceforth be desperately reckoned with.
Given a name, this new-born life-factor was love; love barely
awakened, and as yet no more than a masterful desire to stand well in
the eyes of one woman. None the less, he saw the possibilities: that a
time might come when this woman would have the power to intervene;
would make him hold his hand in the business affair at the very
moment, mayhap, when he should strike the hardest.
It was a rather unnerving thought, and when he considered it he was
glad that their ways, coinciding for the moment, would presently go
apart, leaving him free to do battle as an honest soldier in any cause
must.
The Rosemary party was rising, and Winton rose, too, folding the seat
for Miss Virginia and