A Fool For Love | Page 6

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 carefully reaching her wrap from the rack.
"I am so glad to have met you," she said, giving him the tips of her fingers and going back to the conventionalities as if they had never been ignored.
But the sincerity in Winton's reply transcended the conventional form of it.
"Indeed, the pleasure has been wholly mine, I assure you. I hope the future will be kind to me and let me see more of you."
"Who knows?" she rejoined, smiling at him level-eyed. "The world has been steadily growing smaller since Shakespeare called it 'narrow.'"
He caught quickly at the straw of hope. "Then we need not say good-by?"
"No; let it be auf Wiedersehen," she said; and he stood aside to allow her to join her party.
Two hours later, when Adams was reading in his section and Winton was smoking his short pipe in the men's compartment and thinking things unspeakable with Virginia Carteret