Burned Bridges | Page 3

spruce forest on the farther side of the meadow.
They walked a little way in the open, stopped for a minute, facing each other. Their conversation ended with a sudden quick gesture by the man. Turning, they came on again toward Carr's house. Sam Carr's clear gray eyes lit up. The ghost of a smile hovered about his bearded lips. He watched them approach with that same quizzical expression, a mixture, if one gauged his look aright, of pleasure and pride and expectation.
They were young as years go, the pair that walked slowly up to the cabin. The man was certainly still in his twenties, of medium height, compactly muscular, a good-looking specimen of pure Anglo-Saxon manhood. The girl was a flower in perfect bloom, fresh-colored, slender and pliant as a willow, with all of the willow's grace in every movement. For all the twenty-odd years between them, and the gulf of sex differentiation, there was in her glance and bearing much of the middle-aged man who sat on the porch with a book across his knees and a clay pipe in his mouth. It did not lie in facial resemblance. It was more subtle than likeness of feature. Perhaps it was because of their eyes, alike deep gray, wide and expressive, lifted always to meet another's in level unembarrassed frankness.
They halted at the edge of the porch. The girl sat down. The young man nodded to Carr. Though they had but lately been fair in the path of the thunderstorm they had escaped a wetting. The girl's eyes followed her father's glance, seemed to read his thought.
"We happened to find a spruce thick enough to shed the rain," she smiled. "Or I suppose we'd have been soaked properly."
The young fellow tarried only till she was seated. He had no more than greeted Carr before he lifted his old felt hat to her.
"I'll be paddling back while the coolness lasts," said he. "Good-by."
"Good-by, Tommy," the girl answered.
"So long," Carr followed suit. "Don't give us the go-by too long."
"Oh, no danger."
He walked to the creek bank, stepped into a red canoe that lay nose on to the landing, and backed it free with his paddle. Ten strokes of the blade drove him out of sight around the first brushy bend upstream.
The girl looked thoughtfully after him. Her face was flushed, and her eyes glowed with some queer repressed feeling. Carr sat gazing silently at her while she continued to look after the vanished canoe whose passing left tiny swirls on the dark, sluggish current of Lone Moose. Presently Carr gave the faintest shrug of his lean shoulders and resumed the reading of his book.
When he looked up from the page again after a considerable interval the girl's eyes were fixed intently upon his face, with a queer questioning expression in them, a mute appeal. He closed his book with a forefinger inserted to mark the place, and leaned forward a trifle.
"What is it, Sophie?" he asked gently. "Eh?"
The girl, like her father, and for that matter the majority of those who dwelt in that region, wore moccasins. She sat now, rubbing the damp, bead-decorated toe of one on top of the other, her hands resting idle in the lap of her cotton dress. She seemed scarcely to hear, but Carr waited patiently. She continued to look at him with that peculiar, puzzled quality in her eyes.
"Tommy Ashe wants me to marry him," she said at last.
The faint flush on her smooth cheeks deepened. The glow in her eyes gave way altogether to that vaguely troubled expression.
Carr stroked his short beard reflectively.
"Well," he said at length, "seeing that human nature's what it is, I can't say I'm surprised any more than I would be surprised at the trees leafing out in spring. And, as it happens, Tommy observed the conventions of his class in this matter. He asked me about it a few days ago. I referred him to you. Are you going to?"
"I don't know, Dad," she murmured.
"Do you want to?" he pursued the inquiry in a detached, impersonal tone.
"I don't know," she repeated soberly. "I like Tommy a lot. When I'm with him I feel sure I'd be perfectly happy to be always with him. When I'm away from him, I'm not so sure."
"In other words," Carr observed slowly, "your reason and your emotions are not in harmony on that subject. Eh? So far as Tommy Ashe goes, your mind and your body pull you two different ways."
She looked at him a little more keenly.
"Perhaps," she said. "I know what you mean. But I don't clearly see why it should be so. Either I love Tommy Ashe, or I don't, and I should know which, shouldn't I? The first and most violent manifestation of love is mostly physical, isn't it? I've