SON OF THE WIND
but think—if Mrs. Rader rehearsed his words, what a cad she would think him then! And he was to leave to-morrow, without a chance to explain to her. Explain! Good Lord! Something that he could not explain to himself!
He stared into the dark with fiery thoughts. There had been a question he had started to ask about a horse. That would have to wait now until this thing of immediate importance was settled—the wretched uncertainty of what she thought of him. Mrs. Rader's words had sounded impossible when they had been naked and uttered; but they flowed back to his memory now with a sweet resurgence. He was buoyed up and carried off his logical footing, spun around in eddies of emotion, set down suddenly on the hard sand of doubt, cold with the subsidence of his hopes. What difference did it make what she had thought of him before that wonderful moment, when, after it, she had torn herself away from him; when, by the last glance of her eyes, she had hated. him? That seemed unhuman, cruel, when there had been such harmony. A feeling stirred in his heart, equal to that angry look of hers, ready to meet it.
He walked along the side veranda. Behind him the lights looked out of the kitchen windows. He knew them just kindled. The dinner would be late. He went up the outside stair and passed through his
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