The Vehement Flame Part 29

This at least made him chuckle. "_You?_ How long since? My dear, you couldn't play a set to save your life!"

After that she let him alone for a while. Early in the afternoon the need to make up to him for what she had done grew intolerable: "Darling, let's play solitaire?"

"I'm going to write letters."

She left him to his letters for an hour, then came again: "Let's walk!"

"Well, if you want to," Maurice said, and yawned. So they trudged off.

Eleanor, walking very close to her husband, was thinking, heavily, how far they were apart; but she did her best to amuse him by anxious ponderings of household expenses. He, sheering off to the other side of the road to escape her intimate and jostling shoulder, was thinking of the expenses of another household, and making no effort whatever to amuse her. His silence confessed an irritation which she felt but could not understand; so by and by she fell silent, too, though the helpless tears stood in her eyes. Then, apparently, he put his annoyance, whatever it was, behind him.

"Nelly," he said, "let's go down by the West Branch and meet Edith and Johnny? They'll be coming home that way, 'laden with trout,' I suppose,"

he ended, sarcastically.

Eleanor began to say, "Oh _no_!" Then something, she didn't know what, made her say, "Well, all right." As they turned into the wood road that ran up toward the mountain, she said another unexpected thing:

"Maurice, I'm tired. I'll go home; you go on by yourself, and--and meet Johnny." She didn't know, herself, why she said it! Perhaps, it was just an effort to make up for what she had done in the morning?

Maurice, astonished, made some half-hearted protest; he would go back with her? But she said no, and walked home alone. Her throat ached with unshed tears. "He _likes_ to be with her! He doesn't want me,--and I love him--I love him!"

The two youngsters had made a long day of it. On their way to the brook that morning, crashing through underbrush, climbing rotting rail fences that were hidden in docks and briers, balancing on the precarious slipperiness of mossy rocks, the triumphant Johnny, his heart warm with grat.i.tude to Eleanor, had led his captive and irritated Edith. When they broke through low-hanging boughs and found the pool, the trout possibilities of which Johnny had so earnestly "cracked up," Edith was distinctly grumpy. "Eleanor is a selfish thing," she said. "Gimme a worm."

"I think Maurice would have been cussedly selfish not to do what she wanted," Johnny said; "my idea of marriage is that a man must do everything his wife wants."

"Maurice is never selfish! He's great, simply great!" Edith said.

"Oh, he's decent enough," Johnny admitted, then he paused, frowning, for he couldn't open his bait box; he banged it on a stone, pried his knife under the lid, swore at it--and turned very red. Edith giggled.

"Let me try," she said.

"No use; the rotten thing's stuck."

But she took it, shook it, gave an easy twist, and the maddening lid--loosened, of course, by Johnny's exertions--came off! Edith shrieked with joy; but Johnny, though mortified, was immensely relieved. They sat down on a sloping rock, and talked bait, and the grave and spectacled Johnny became his old self, scolding Edith for talking so loudly. "Girls," he said, "are _born_ not fishermen!" Then they waded out into the stream, and began to cast. It was broad daylight by this time, and the woods were filling with netted sunbeams; the water whispered and chuckled.

"Pretty nice?" Johnny said, in a low voice; and Edith, all her grumpiness flown, said:

"You bet it is!" Then, as an afterthought, she called back, "But Eleanor is the limit!"

Johnny, forgetting his grat.i.tude to Eleanor, said, savagely: "_Keep quiet!_ You scared him off! Gosh! girls are awful."

So Edith kept quiet, and he wandered up the stream, and she wandered down the stream, and they fished, and they fished--and they never caught a thing.

"I had _one_ bite," Johnny said when, at about eleven, fiercely hungry, they met on the bank where they had left their lunch basket; "but you burst out about Eleanor, and drove him off. Girls simply _can't_ fish."

Edith was contrite--but doubted the bite. Then they sat down on a mossy rock, and ate stacks of sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, and watched the water, and talked, talked, talked. At least Edith talked--mostly about Maurice. Johnny lit his pipe, puffed once or twice, then let it go out and sat staring into the green wall of the woods on the other side of the brook. Then, suddenly, quietly, he began to speak....

"I want to say something."

"The mosquitoes here are awful!" Edith said, nervously; "don't you think we'd better go home?"

"Look here, Edith; you've got to be half decent to me--unless, of course, you've soured on me? If you have, I'll shut up."

"Johnny, don't be an idiot! 'Course I haven't soured on you. You're the oldest friend I've got. Older than Maurice, even."

"Well, I guess I am an older friend than Maurice! But lately you've treated me like a dog. You skulk round to keep from being by ourselves.

You never give me a chance to open my head to you--"

"Johnny, that's perfectly absurd! I've had to look after Eleanor--"

"Eleanor _nothing_! It's me you want to shake."

"I do _not_ want to shake you! I'm just busy."

"Edith, I care a lot about you. I don't care much for girls, as a rule.

But you're not girly. And every time I try to talk to you, you sidestep me."

"Now, Johnny--"

"But I'm going to tell you, all the same." He made a clutch at the sopping-wet hem of her skirt. "I _will_ say it! I care an awful lot about you. I'm not a boy. I want to marry you."

There was a dead silence; then Edith said, despairingly, "Oh, Johnny, how perfectly horrid you are!" He gasped. "You simply spoil everything with this sort of ... of ... of talk."

"You mean you don't like me?" His face twitched.

"Like you? I like you awfully! That's why I'm so mad at you. Why, I'm _awfully_ fond of you--"

"Edith!"

"I mean I never had a friend like you. I've always liked you ten times better than any silly old girl friend I ever had. I've liked you _almost_ as much as Maurice. Of course I shall never like anybody as much as Maurice. He comes next to father and mother. But now you go and--and talk ... I just can't bear it," Edith said, and fumbled for her pocket handkerchief; "I _hate_ talk." Her eyes overflowed.

"Edith! Look here; now, _don't_! Honestly, I can stand being turned down, but I can't stand--that. Edith, _please_! I never saw you do that--girl stunt. I'll never bother you again, if you'll just stop crying!"

Edith, unable to find her handkerchief, bent over and wiped her eyes on her dress. "I'm _not_ crying," she said, huskily; "but--"

"I think," John Bennett said, "honestly, Edith, I think I've loved you all my life."

"And I have loved you," she said; "You are a lamb! Oh, Johnny, I'm perfectly crazy about you!"

His swiftly illuminating face made her add, hastily, "and now you go and spoil everything!"

"I won't spoil things, Skeezics," he said, gently; "oh, say, Edith, let up on crying! _That_ breaks me all up."

But Edith, having discovered her handkerchief, was mopping very flushed cheeks and mumbling on about her own woes. "Why can't you be satisfied just to go on the way we always have? Why can't you be satisfied to have me like you almost as much as I like Maurice?"

"Maurice!" the young man said, with a helpless laugh. "Oh, Edith, you are several kinds of a goose! In the first place, Maurice is married; and in the second place, he's old enough to be your father--"

"He isn't old enough to be my father! And I shall _never_ like anybody as much as Maurice, because there isn't anybody like him in the entire world. I've always thought he was exactly like Sir Walter Raleigh.