The Tyranny of Weakness | Page 6

The sight of her
tear-stained faced had freed him of that.
"I come here every night," he acknowledged simply, "to watch you
over there on the porch--because--" He balked a moment there, but only
a moment, before declaring baldly what he had so often failed to
announce gallantly--"Because I'm crazy about you--because I love
you."
For a moment she gazed up at him and her breath came fast, then she

suggested, a little shaken, "It isn't much farther on to the house. You
used to come the whole way."
"You told me not to."
"If you had--had cared very much you would have come any way."
"I've cared enough," he reminded her, "to sit out here every night until
you put out your light and went to sleep. If you had wanted me you'd
have said so."
Impulsively she laid a trembling hand on his arm and spoke in rushing
syllables. "I thought you'd come without being sent for--then when I
knew you wouldn't, I couldn't hear it. I wrote you a note to-night.... I
was going to send it to-morrow.... I'm going home the next day."
A whippoorwill called plaintively from the hillside. He had spoken and
in effect she had answered. All the night's fragrance and cadence
merged into a single witchery which was a part of themselves. For the
first and most miraculous time, the flood tide of love had lifted them
and their feet were no longer on the earth.
"But--but--" stammered the boy, moistening his lips, "you were singing
and laughing with Jimmy Hancock and the rest ten minutes ago, and
now--"
The girl's delicately rounded chin came up in the tilt of pride.
"Do you think I'd show them how I felt?" she demanded. "Do you think
I'd tell anybody--except you."
Stuart Farquaharson had a sensation of hills and woods whirling in
glorified riot through an infinity of moon mists and star dust. He felt
suddenly mature and strong and catching her in his arms he pressed her
close, kissing her hair and temples until she, fluttering with the
wildness of her first embrace of love, turned her lips up to his kisses.
But soon Conscience drew away and at once her cheeks grew hot with

blushes and maidenly remorse. She had been reared in an
uncompromising school of puritanism. Her father would have regarded
her behavior as profoundly shocking. She herself, now that it was over,
regarded it so, though she wildly and rebelliously told herself that she
would not undo it, if she could.
"Oh," she exclaimed in a low voice, "oh, Stuart, what were we thinking
about!"
"We were thinking that we belong to each other," he fervently assured
her. "As long as I live I belong to you--and to no one else, and you--"
"But we're only children," she demurred, with a sudden outcropping of
the practical in the midst of romanticism. "How do we know we won't
change our minds?"
"I won't change mine," he said staunchly. "And I won't let you change
yours. You will write to me, won't you?" he eagerly demanded, but she
shook her head.
"Father doesn't let me write to boys," she told him.
"At least you'll be back--next summer?"
"I'm afraid not. I don't know."
Stuart Farquaharson drew a long breath. His face set itself in rigid
resolve.
"If they send you to the North Pole and stop all my letters and put a
regiment of soldiers around you, and keep them there, it won't alter
matters in the long run," he asseverated, with boyhood assurance, "You
belong to me and you are going to marry me."
A voice from the house began calling and the girl answered quickly,
"I'm just in the garden. I'll be right in." But before she went she turned
to the boy again and her eyes were dancing incorrigibly.
"You won't go out and join any Newmarket cadets or anything and get

killed meanwhile, will you?"
"I will not," he promptly replied. "And when we have a house of our
own we'll have framed copies of Barbara Freitchie hanging all over the
place if you want them."
To Stuart Farquaharson just then the future seemed very sure. He had
no way of knowing that after to-morrow years lay between the present
and their next meeting--and that after that--but of course he could not
read the stars.
CHAPTER III
The sand bar rose like a white island beyond the mild surf of the shore,
distant enough to make it a reservation for those hardier swimmers who
failed to find contentment between beach and float. Outside the bar the
surf boiled in spume-crowned, and went out again sullenly howling an
in-sucking of sands and an insidious tug of undertow.
One head only bobbed far out as a single swimmer shaped his course in