She flung out her hands in a gesture of protest "I have seen so few."
His lips were opened to tell her of her own beauty, but something restrained him, some perception of maidenly dignity that enfolded her and made her more than the girl who had waited on the table.
"You were a polite little boy," she recalled, filling the breach made by his silence. "I remember that you carried me across the street, to save my slippers from the wet. I thought you were wonderful. I have never forgotten."
Neither had Van Alen forgotten. It had been a great feat for his little strength. There had been other boys there, bigger boys, but he had offered, and had been saved humiliation by her girlish slimness and feather weight.
"I was a strong little fellow then," was his comment: "I am a strong little fellow now."
She turned on him reproachful eyes. "Why do you always harp on it?" she demanded.
"On what?"
"Your size. You twist everything, turn everything, so that we come back to it."
He tried to answer lightly, but his voice shook. "Perhaps it is because in your presence I desire more than ever the full stature of a man."
He was in deadly earnest. Hitherto he had been willing to match his brain, his worldly knowledge, his ancestry, against the charms of the women he had met; but here with this girl, standing like a young G.o.ddess under the wide, sunset sky, he felt that only for strength and beauty should she choose her mate.
He wondered what he must seem in her eyes; with his shoulder on a level with hers, with his stocky build that saved him from effeminacy, his carefulness of attire--which is at once the burden and the salvation of the small man.
As for his face, he knew that its homeliness was redeemed by a certain strength of chin, by keen gray eyes, and by a shock of dark hair that showed a little white at the temples. There were worse-looking men, he knew, but that, at the present moment, gave little comfort.
She chose to receive his remark in silence, and, as they came to a path that branched from the road, she said:
"I am going to help take care of a child who is sick. You see I am mistress of all trades--nurse, waitress, charwoman, when there is nothing else."
He glanced at her hands. "I cannot believe that you scrub," he said.
"I sit up at night to care for my hands"--there was a note of bitterness in her tone--"and I wear gloves when I work. There are some things that one desires to hold on to, and my mother and my grandmother were ladies of leisure."
"Would you like that--to be a lady of leisure?"
She turned and smiled at him. "How can I tell?" she asked; "I have never tried it."
She started to leave him as she said it, but he held her with a question: "Shall you sit up all night?"
She nodded. "His mother has had no sleep for two nights."
"Is he very ill?"
The girl shrugged her shoulders. "Who knows? There is no doctor near, and his mother is poor. We are fighting it out together."
There was something heroic in her cool acceptance of her hard life. He was silent for a moment, and then he said: "Would you have time to read my book to-night?"
"Oh, if I might," she said eagerly, "but you haven"t it with you."
"I will bring it," he told her, "after supper."
"But," she protested.
"There are no "buts,"" he said, smiling; "if you will read it, I will get it to you."
The sky had darkened, and, as he went toward home, he faced clouds in the southeast.
"It is going to rain," Otto Brand prophesied as they sat down to supper.
The other three men hoped that it would not. Already the ground was soaked, making the cutting of corn impossible, and another rain with a frost on top of it would spoil all chance of filling the silo.
Van Alen could not enter into their technical objections. He hoped it would not rain, because he wanted to take a book to Mazie Wetherell, and he had not brought a rain-coat.
But it did rain, and he went without a rain-coat!
The house, as he neared it, showed no light, and under the thick canopy of the trees there was no sound but the drip, drip of the rain. By feeling and instinct he found the front door, and knocked.
There was a movement inside, and then Mazie Wetherell asked softly: "Who"s there?"
"I have brought the book."
The bolt was withdrawn, and in the hall, scarcely lighted by the shaded lamp in the room beyond, stood the girl, in a loose gray gown, with braided shining hair--a shadowy being, half-merged into the shadows.
"I thought you would not come," in a hushed tone, "in such a storm."
"I said I should come. The book may help you through the long night."
She caught her breath quickly. "The child is awfully ill."
"Are you afraid? Let me stay."
"Oh, no, no. His mother is sleeping, and I shall have your book."
She did not ask him in, and so he went away at once, beating his way back in the wind and rain, fording a little stream where the low foot-bridge was covered, reaching home soaking wet, but afire with dreams.
Otto Brand was waiting for him, a little curious as to what had taken him out so late, but, getting no satisfaction, he followed Van Alen up-stairs, and built a fire for him in the big bedroom. And presently, in the light of the leaping flames, the roses on the canopy of the bed glowed pink.
"Ain"t you goin" to sleep in the bed?" Otto asked, as he watched Van Alen arrange the covers on the couch.
"No," said Van Alen shortly, "the honor is too great. It might keep me awake."
"My feet would hang over," Otto said. "Funny thing, wasn"t it, for a man to make a will like that?"
"I suppose every man has a right to do as he pleases," Van Alen responded coldly. He was not inclined to discuss the eccentricities of his little old ancestor with this young giant.
"Of course," Otto agreed, and his next remark was called forth by Van Alen"s pale blue pajamas.
"Well, those are new on me."
Van Alen explained that in the city they were worn, and that silk was cool, but while he talked he was possessed by a kind of fury. For the first time the delicate garments, the luxurious toilet articles packed in his bag, seemed foppish, unnecessary, things for a woman. With all of them, he could not compete with this fair young G.o.d, who used a rough towel and a tin basin on the kitchen bench.