Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/338

 at her with so much leaping, sparkling joy in his blue eyes, that Louise felt ashamed to take advantage of his forgiving innocence. She had wronged him doubly, but there was not a shadow of such memories on his ingenuous soul. She drew on his hand to pull him out of the crowd.

"You don't need to buy one of those books," she said.

"Why, Miss Louise!" Tom repeated, in that same amazed, glad way.

There was a bench under the maple trees in the square, close by a cement fountain that never had thrown a jet of water in its day. Not a very secluded place, for seclusion in affairs between people was not encouraged by McPacken, which liked above everything to know what was going on.

A big electric light hung over them, just a little way to one side, around which a cloud of hard-backed, fascinated June-bugs blundered to their doom, to fall in a constant showering, attended by little sounds of sizzling, to the grass. Others had sat on the same bench under like conditions, with similar business before them; others would come after them in their order and sit there, where all McPacken that crossed the square might see.

"Did you do well with your cattle, Tom?" she asked. She was sitting on his lee side, his shadow falling over her like a protecting cloak.

"Yes, Miss Louise, I did right well with them."

"When did you come back?"

"Just this evening, Miss Louise."