The Desert and the Sown | Page 7

at her with all his passion in his eyes. "I did not choose. Did
you?"
"It isn't too late," she whispered. Her face grew hot in the darkness.
"Yes; it is too late--for anything but the truth. Will you listen, sweet?
Will you let the nonsense wait?"
"Deeper and deeper! Haven't we reached the bottom yet?"

"Go on! It's the dearest nonsense," she heard him say; but she detected
pain in his voice and a new constraint.
"What is it? What is the 'truth'?"
"Oh, it's not so dreadful. Only, you always put me in quite a different
class from where I belong, and I haven't had the courage to set you
right."
"Children, children!" a young voice called, from the lighted walk above.
Two figures were going down the line, one in uniform keeping step
beside a girl in white who reefed back her skirts with one hand, the
other was raised to her hair which was blowing across her forehead in
bewitching disorder. Every gesture and turn of her shape announced
that she was pretty and gay in the knowledge of her power. It was
Chrissy, walking with Lieutenant Lane.
"Where are you--ridiculous ones? Don't you want to come with us?"
"'Now who were they?'" Paul quoted derisively out of the dark.
"We are going to Captain Dawson's to play Hearts. Come! Don't be
stupid!"
"We are not stupid, we are busy!" Moya called back.
"Busy! Doing what?"
"Oh, deciding things. We are talking about the Poor Man."
"The poor men, she means." Christine's high laugh followed the
lieutenant's speech, as the pair went on.
"He is a bore!" Moya declared. "We can't even use him for a joke."
"Speaking of Lane, dear?"
"The Poor Man. Are you sure that you've got a sense of humor, Paul?
Can't we have charity for jokes among the other poor things?"
Paul had raised himself to the step beside her. "You are shivering," he
said, "I must let you go in."
"I'm not shivering--I'm chattering," she mocked. "Why should I go in
when we are going to be really serious?"
Paul waited a moment; his breath came short, as if he were facing a
postponed dread. "Moya, dear," he began in a forced tone, "I can't help
my constraints and convictions that bore you so, any more than you can
help your light heart--God bless it--and your theory of class which to
me seems mediaeval. I have cringed to it, like the coward a man is
when he is in love. But now I want you to know me."
He took her hand and kissed it repeatedly, as if impressing upon her the

one important fact back of all hypothesis and perilous efforts at
statement.
"Well, are you bidding me good-by?"
"You must give me time," he said. "It takes courage in these days for a
good American to tell the girl he loves that his father was a hired man."
He smiled, but there was little mirth and less color in his face.
"What absurdity!" cried Moya. Then glancing at him she added quickly,
"My father is a hired man. Most fathers who are worth anything are!"
"My father was because he came of that class. His father was one
before him. His mother took in tailoring in the village where he was
born. He had only the commonest common-school education and not
much of that. At eleven he worked for his board and clothes at my
Grandfather Van Elten's, and from that time he earned his bread with
his hands. Don't imagine that I'm apologizing," Paul went on rapidly.
"The apology belongs on the other side. In New York, for instance, the
Bogardus blood is quite as good as the Bevier or the Broderick or the
Van Elten; but up the Hudson, owing to those chances or mischances
that selected our farming aristocracy for us, my father's people had
slipped out of their holdings and sunk to the poor artisan class which
the old Dutch landowners held in contempt."
"We are not landowners," said Moya. "What does it matter? What does
any of it matter?"
"It matters to be honest and not sail under false colors. I thought you
would not speak of the Poor Man as you do if you knew that I am his
son."
"Money has nothing to do with position in the army. I am a poor man's
daughter."
"Ah, child! Your father gives orders--mine took them, all his life."
"My father has to take what he gives. There is no escaping 'orders.'
Even I know that!" said Moya. A slight shiver passed over her as she
spoke, laughing off as usual the touch of seriousness in her words.
"Why did you do that?" Paul touched her shoulder. "Is it the wind?
There is a wind creeping