Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/321

 It was not until the desperate woman had, in the terminology of Billy Durgin, been "baffled and beaten at every turn," that I could get into communication with her on a basis at all acceptable to a free-necked man. Having proved to the last resource of her ingenuity that Jim was more than human in his loyalty, she seemed disposed to admit, though grudgingly enough, that I myself might be not less than human to have won him so utterly. And thereafter I found it often practicable to associate with her on terms of apparent equality.

She surrendered, I believe, on a day when she had thought to lure Jim into her boat,—fatuously, for was I not a distinguishable figure in the landscape? Her hopes must have been high, for she had but lately repleted him with chicken-bones divinely crunchable, and then bestowed upon him a charlotte russe, an unnatural taste for which she had succeeded in teaching him.

With something of a swagger,—she swaggered in a rather starchy white dress that day, and under a garden hat of broad rim,—she had enticed him to the water's edge, so that I must have been nervous but for knowing the dog through and through.

Her failure was so crushing, so swift, so entire, that for an instant I almost failed to rejoice in her open humiliation. Seated in the boat, oars poised, she invited Jim with soft speech and a smile that might have moved an iron dog without occasioning any remark from me; but Jim, noting, with one paw