Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/247

 you broken," she cried piteously, hugging him close, "Oh, I don't want you broken!"

"Broken?" Harrington smiled expansively at his unexpectedly quick victory. "Why, how little you understand your father!"

"Little you do!" she retorted in a voice muffled against his side, and he felt her body shuddering against his. "Besides, I promised them you wouldn't. Oh, you humiliate me so!"

Harrington started and held her off from him fiercely. "W-what!" he gasped, horrified. "You promised them? Who? Promised what?"

"Scanlon and father," wailed the muffled voice. "Promised that I wouldn't let you make a fool of yourself like this."

"Then you . . . you knew all about it before I told you?" breathed Henry, aghast. The girl lifted her head to face the accusation in his tone, and saw slow horror mounting in her lover's eyes. "You were only acting then—when you gave yourself up to me" he charged, and his voice trembled as his mind reviewed the sacred emotions of the last hour.

"No, no," she protested frenziedly. "Don't look at me, Henry, like that. I meant—oh, your kisses meant everything to me. I—I was trying to forget that we had to—disagree so, so horribly!"

Something of the revulsion in him lessened. He could understand that. He too had tried to forget, but—she had promised them not to let him make a fool of himself. She, too, was a back-scratcher! Her glance fell before the indictment in his eyes, and, sobbing as if discovered in shame and overcome with humiliation, she turned to sit apart from him upon a fallen tree.