Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/310

 They sat on a fallen log and, still holding her hand, he asked, "What is it? What has happened?"

"Nothing. . . . I'm just tired."

"Are you willing to come away with me? Now?" And in a low, warm voice, he added, "I'll never let you be tired again . . . never."

She did not answer him, because it seemed to her that what she had to tell him made all her actions in the past seem inexplicable and cheap. She was filled with shame, and tried to put off the moment when she must speak.

"I haven't been down in three days," he was saying, "because there's been trouble in Boston which made it impossible. I've only slept an hour or two a night. They've been trying to do me in . . . some of the men I always trusted. They've been double-crossing me all along and I had to stay to fight them."

He told her a long and complicated story of treachery, of money having been passed among men whom he had known and trusted always. He was sad and yet defiant, too, and filled with a desire to fight the thing to an end. She failed to understand the story; indeed she did not even hear much of it: she only knew that he was telling her everything, pouring out all his sadness and trouble to her as if she were the one person in all the world to whom he could tell such things.

And when he had finished he waited for a moment and then said, "And now I'm willing to chuck the whole dirty business and quit . . . to tell them all to go to hell."

Quickly she answered, "No, you mustn't do that. You can't do that. A man like you, Michael, daren't do such a thing. . . ." For she knew that without a battle life would mean nothing to him.

"No . . . I mean it. I'm ready to quit. I want you to go with me."

She thought, "He says this . . . and yet he stayed three