Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/232

 "Henry!" The word, a cry rather, was abrupt and ringing, full of vibrant joy, the sudden relief after long and painful suspense. With it the girl came over quickly and bent her face into his arm, weeping.

Harrington smiled wonderingly and, looking down, touched caressingly the glossy braids of her hair. As he felt pleasurably the weight of her little body upon his arm, he was inspired with a new, quick compassion for the girl, realizing that she who had always been so strong and self-sufficient, teasing him, challenging him at times, was after all mere frail femininity.

"But—are you strong enough, do you think?" Lahleet asked, suddenly lifting her tearful face. "Strong enough for what they will do to you?"

"Do to me?" laughed Henry. "What can they do to me? Besides, I shall not attack Mr. Boland—not at all. I shall merely show that Boland General resorted to a mistaken piece of strategy on the ground of which Adam John is entitled to acquittal."

But the little school-teacher's face was full of apprehension. "He will fight you; it will cost you . . . everything!" she persisted.

Henry did not try to argue. Lahleet, with all that white blood and white education could do for her, was still simple, elemental; she scorned to fathom the complexities of highly organized natures like, for instance, his and Mr. Boland's.

"At least I ought to tell Billie," he saw quite clearly, when Lahleet had gone, after kissing his hand impulsively, as she had done once before; "for I—I'm going to have to hurt her a little—a very little at least," he perceived, a sickish feeling in his breast.

But he told Scanlon first, because Scanlon was