Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 1, 1922 — page 120: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

910 as some medieval portal, and down the semicircular steps of stone toward the gar- den. - It was larger than it had seemed from his high window that afternoon; they had no sooner passed the first hedge than the house was shut from view behind them—there was only the dark, rolling woodland far across the slope. ‘ Suppose we sit here,” suggested Dickon. It was one of those hedge-inclosed pat- terns with a fountain tossing in the middle of it, so high that its head caught the lights from the house and sparkled like silver as it nodded and rose and fell, shaken out a bit to one side now and then when the breeze freshened, and the spray rushed across the pool, at such times, with a burst of louder whispering. “Ves,” she answered, and sat down with- out a glance around her, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on her hands. It made Dickon writhe with shame to look at her; there was both pity and self-contempt and deep irritation as he watched her sub- missiveness. It was a marble seat with a broad, high, gracefully curving back. He sat down and rested against the farther end of it, and while he lighted his cigarette he noted that she relaxed a little, as if in appreciation of the distance he kept. In his anger he snapped the lighted match away. It made a tiny arch of red and went out before it struck the lawn. | “ Beginnings are always hard, aren’t they?” he suggested. For a moment she continued to stare be- fore her, and then the silence gradually told her that he had spoken. She started and jerked her head toward him. “Yes,” said the girl in hardly more than a whisper. He blew the ashes from his cigarette and studied the glowing coal in thought; and she took advantage of that interim to glance quickly, sidewise; it was a relentless profile that she saw, she thought. Stories which she had heard slipped back into her mind as they had been doing.all the evening. There were many tales about men involved ever so slightly with women, men who used their advantages without scruple. Fortune- ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. hunters, they were, and with as little mercy as the pirates of the Spanish Main. The dying glow from the cigarette showed at last only the line of the strong, bony knuckles. He felt her tenseness, and perhaps he guessed very largely at what was going through her mind. | ‘“'When I passed you in the hall,’ he said again, “ you remember?” rr No.” “You were talking with Vincent and Loriston, you know.” He watched her raise her hand covertly and press it against the base of her throat; there was a lump there, he guessed. ce Yes.”’ “You looked at me oddly, I thought.” Steps approached them, and she turned her head toward them and he saw the faint glimmer of her eyes in that half light in- crease; but the steps veered away and her head fell again. “T had no intention of doing that,” mur- mured Cynthia. | ‘““T suppose you hadn’t, but the odd look was there, nevertheless.” ce I’m sorry.” “I wish you would not talk like that!” he broke out. She shrank from him a little, watching him, and it curdled his blood as though he had struck her. ‘What have I said?” “ Nothing,” he answered, his shame mak- ing his voice gruff. ‘ But I’ll tell you what. I’m going to say a good many things to you. For Heaven’s sake don’t be alarmed!” Her fear, his precarious position on the verge of losing all hold upon her, excited, stimulated him; he came naturally to one of his characteristic maneuvers, rash and cunning in its rashness, She already knew a great deal by inference and from her mother. Why not let her see that he was keeping nothing from her? Set her free from all obligation; let James Vincent have an equal start with him, and then race the race out on its merits? It made him sit straighter on the seat merely to think of it. ‘“ Before you came down here I suppose you had a talk with your mother?” She had been leaning back against the comicloool C©