A Touch of Sun and Other Stories | Page 4

him go. And the family! Think of their accepting his proposal in silence. Why, can they even be married, Henry, without some process of law?"
"Heaven knows! I don't know how far the other thing had gone--far enough to make questions awkward."
Husband and wife remained seated side by side on the son's deserted bed. The shape of each was disconsolately outlined to the other against the tent's illumined walls. Now a wind-swayed branch of manzanita rasped the canvas, and cast upon it shadows of its moving leaves.
"It's pretty rough on quiet old folks like us, with no money to get us into trouble," said Mr. Thorne. "The boy is not a beauty, he's not a swell. He is just a plain, honest boy with a good working education. If you judge a woman, as some say you can, by her choice of men, she shouldn't be very far out of the way."
"It is very certain you cannot judge a man by his choice of women."
"You cannot judge a boy by the women that get hold of him. But Willy is not such a babe as you think. He's a deuced quiet sort, but he's not been knocking around by himself these ten years, at school and college and vacations, without picking up an idea or two--possibly about women. Experience, I grant, be probably lacks; but he has the true-bred instinct. We always have trusted him so far; I'm willing to trust him now. If there are things he ought to know about this woman, leave him to find them out for himself."
"After he has married her! And you don't even know whether a marriage is possible without some sort of shuffling or concealment; do you?"
"I don't, but they probably do. Her family aren't going to get themselves into that kind of a scrape."
"I have no opinion whatever of the family. I think they would accept any kind of a compromise that money can buy."
"Very likely, and so would we if we had a daughter"--
"Why, we have a daughter! It is our daughter, all the daughter we shall ever call ours, that you are talking about. And to think of the girls and girls he might have had! Lovely girls, without a flaw--a flaw! She will fall to pieces in his hand. She is like a broken vase put together and set on the shelf to look at."
"Now we are losing our sense of proportion. We must sleep on this, or it will blot out the whole universe for us."
"It has already for me. I haven't a shadow of faith in anything left."
"And I haven't read the paper. Suppose the boy were in Cuba now!"
"I wish he were! It is a judgment on me for wanting to save him up, for insisting that the call was not for him."
"That's just it, you see. You have to trust a man to know his own call. Whether it's love or war, he is the one who has got to answer."
"But you will write to him to-morrow, Henry? He must be saved, if the truth can save him. Think of the awakening!"
"My dear, if he loves her there will be no awakening. If there is, he will have to take his dose like other men. There is nothing in the truth that can save him, though I agree with you that he ought to know it--from her."
"If you had only told her your name, Henry! Then she would have had a fingerpost to warn her off our ground. To think what you did for her, and how you are repaid!"
"It was a very foolish thing I did for her; I wasn't proud of it. That was one reason why I did not tell her my name."
Mr. Thorne removed his weight from the cot. The warped wires twanged back into place.
"Come, Maggie, we are too old not to trust in the Lord--or something. Anyhow, it's cooler. I believe we shall sleep to-night."
"And haven't I murdered sleep for you, you poor old man? What a thing it is to have nerve and no nerves! I know you feel just as wrecked as I do. I wish you would say so. I want it said to the uttermost. If I could but--our only boy--our boy of 'highest hopes'! You remember the dear old Latin words in his first 'testimonials'?"
"They must have been badly disappointed in their girl, and I suppose they had their 'hopes,' too."
"They should not drag another into the pit, one too innocent to have imagined such treachery."
"I wouldn't make too much of his innocence. He is all right so far as we know; he's got precious little excuse for not being: but there is no such gulf between any two young humans; there can't be, especially when one is a man. Take my hand. There's