Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/418

416 "Oh, Lloyd! You don't think that any girl out there"

"No. Or if there was he's lost her. But I noticed him talking with Carter and Orde last night. It's Canada has taken him, I guess. He means to give himself to his work, and not to anything else."

Betty scoffed at this doctrine and angled for him with all the arts which she and her friends could muster. In the first glow of her own love she appealed to Tempest vividly, and he delighted to take her about. She was much younger than himself; and she had been a merry child when he was a tall and studious boy. She was a merry girl still, and she brought the sweets of life back to him in many ways through those brief weeks. Tempest had that quiet, interested courtesy which charms wherever it goes; but his serene indifference to its effects roused Betty's ire, and one evening as he smoked his cigar under the scented limes she came to him, running in her white dress over the grassy lawn, and walked up and down with him. Her hand was through his arm, and she chattered to him and scolded him, half in mischief, half in real earnest. For a while Tempest parried her thrusts with good-natured evasion. Then he turned on her slim finger the ring which sparkled through the starlight.

"It's once and for altogether, Betty dear?" he asked.

"Oh, yes." She fell shy instantly at confessing her love.

"Even though you lost him there could never be anyone else?"

"Never! Oh, never!"

"Well—that's my answer, dear," he said gently.