Little Miss Grouch | Page 2

head, this time so violently that her hair--soft, curly, luxuriant hair--loosened and clouded about her forehead and ears. In a voice no more than a husky, tremulous whisper, which was too low even to be intended to carry across the widening water-space, and therefore manifestly purposed for the establishment of her own conviction, she said:
"I wo-won't. I won't. I WON'T!!!" At the third declaration she brought a saber-edged heel down square upon the most afflicted toe of a very sore foot which the Tyro had been nursing since a collision in the squash court some days previous. Involuntarily he uttered a cry of anguish, followed by a monosyllabic quotation from the original Anglo-Saxon. The girl turned upon him a baleful face, while the long-distance conversationalist on the dock reverted to his original possession and faded from sight in a series of involuted spasms.
"What did you say?" she demanded, still in that hushed and catchy voice.
"'Hell,'" repeated the Tyro, in a tone of explication, "'is paved with good intentions.' It's a proverb."
"I know that as well as you do," she whispered resentfully. "But what has that to do with--with me?"
"Lord! What a vicious little spitfire it is," said he to himself. Then, aloud: "It was my good intention to remove that foot and substitute the other one, which is better able to sustain--"
"Was that your foot I stepped on?"
"It was. It is now a picturesque and obsolete ruin."
"It had no right to be there."
"But that's where I've always kept it," he protested, "right at the end of that leg."
"If you want me to say I'm sorry, I won't, I won't--I--"
"Help!" cried the Tyro. "One more of those 'won'ts' and I'm a cripple for life."
There was a convulsive movement of the features beneath the heavy veil, which the Tyro took to be the beginning of a smile. He was encouraged. The two young people were practically alone now, the crowd having moved forward for sight of a French liner sweeping proudly up the river. The girl turned her gaze upon the injured member.
"Did I really hurt you much?" she asked, still whispering.
"Not a bit," lied the Tyro manfully. "I just made that an excuse to get you to talk."
"Indeed!" The head tilted up, furnishing to the Tyro the distinct moulding, under the blurring fabric, of a determined and resentful chin. "Well, I can't talk. I can only whisper."
"Sore throat?"
"No."
"Well, it's none of my business," conceded the Tyro. "But you rather looked as if--as if you were in trouble, and I thought perhaps I could help you."
"I don't want any help. I'm all right." To prove which she began to cry again.
The Tyro led her over to a deck-chair and made her sit down. "Of course you are. You just sit there and think how all-right you are for five minutes and then you will be all right."
"But I'm not going back. Never! Never!! Nev-ver!!!"
"Certainly not," said the Tyro soothingly.
"You speak to me as if I were a child!"
"So you are--almost."
"That's what they all think at home. That's why I'm--I'm running away from them," she wailed, in a fresh access of self-commiseration.
"Running away! To Europe?"
"Where did you think this ship was bound for?"
"But--all alone?" queried the other, thunderstruck.
"All alone?" She contrived to inform her whisper with a malicious mimicry of his dismay. "I suppose the girls you know take the whole family along when they run away. Idiot!"
"Go ahead!" he encouraged her. "Take it out on me. Relieve your feelings. You can't hurt mine."
"I haven't even got a maid with me," mourned the girl. "She got left. F-f-father will have a fu-fu-fit!"
"Father was practicing for it, according to my limited powers of observation, when last seen."
"What! Where did you see him?"
"Wasn't it father who was giving the commendable imitation of a whirling dervish on the pier-head?"
"Heavens, no! That's the--the man I'm running away from."
"The plot thickens. I thought it was your family you were eluding."
"Everybody! Everything! And I'm never coming back. There's no way they can get me now, is there?"
A reiterated word of the convulsive howler on the dock had stuck in the Tyro's mind. "What about the pilot-boat?"
"Oh! Could they? What shall I do? I won't go back. I'll jump overboard first. And you do nothing but stand there like a ninny."
"Many thanks, gentle maiden," returned her companion, unperturbed, "for this testimonial of confidence and esteem. With every inclination to aid and abet any crime or misdemeanor within reach, I nevertheless think I ought to be let in on the secret before I commit myself finally."
"It--it's that Thing on the dock."
"So you led me to infer."
"He wants to marry me."
"Well, America is the land of boundless ambitions," observed the young man politely.
"But they'll make me marry him if I stay," came the half-strangled whisper. "I'm engaged to him, I tell you."
"No;