"Why yes," she said at length, "I will be interested in what you undertake. You will be Dad's partner."

Her evasion nettled him.

"Zen," he said, "why shouldn't we understand each other?"

"Don't we?" She had turned slightly toward him, and he could feel the laughing mockery in her eyes.

"I rather think we do," he answered, "only we--at least, you--won't admit it."

"Oh!"

"Seriously, Zen, do you imagine I came over here to-day simply to make a deal with your father?"

"Wasn't that worth while?"

"Of course it was. But it wasn't the whole purpose--it wasn't half the purpose. I wanted to see Y.D., it is true, but more, very much more, I wanted to see you."

She did not answer, and he could only guess what was the trend of her thoughts. After a silence he continued.

"You may think I am precipitate. You intimated as much to me once. I am.

I know of no reason why an honest man should go beating about the bush.

When I want something I want it, and I make a bee-line for it. If it is a contract--if it is a business matter--I go right after it, with all the energy that's in me. When I'm looking for a contract I don't start by talking about the weather. Well--this is my first experience in love, and perhaps my methods are all wrong, but it seems to me they should apply. At any rate a girl of your intelligence will understand."

"Applying your business principles," she interrupted, "I suppose if you wanted a wife and there was none in sight you would advertise for her?"

He defended his position. "I don't see why not," he declared. "I can't understand the general att.i.tude of levity toward matrimonial advertis.e.m.e.nts. Apparently they are too open and above-board. Matrimony should not be committed in a round-about, indirect, hit-or-miss manner.

A young man sees a girl whom he thinks he would like to marry. Does he go to her house and say, 'Miss So-and-So, I think I would like to marry you. Will you allow me to call on you so that we may get better acquainted, with that object in view?' He does not. Such honesty would be considered almost brutal. He calls on her and pretends he would like to take her to the theatre, if it is in town, or for a ride, if it is in the country. She pretends she would like to go. Both of them know what the real purpose is, and both of them pretend they don't. They start the farce by pretending a deceit which deceives n.o.body. They wait for nature to set up an attraction which shall overrule their judgment, rather than act by judgment first and leave it to nature to take care of herself.

How much better it would be to be perfectly frank--to boldly announce the purpose--to come as I now come to you and say, 'Zen, I want to marry you. My reason, my judgment, tells me that you would be an ideal mate.

I shall be proud of you, and I will try to make you proud of me. I will gratify your desires in every way that my means will permit. I pledge you my fidelity in return for yours. I--I--' Zen, will you say yes? Can you believe that there is in my simple words more sincerity than there could be in any mad ravings about love? You are young, Zen, younger than I, but you must have observed some things. One of them is that marriage, founded on mutual respect, which increases with the years, is a much safer and wiser business than marriage founded on a pa.s.sion which quickly burns itself out and leaves the victims cold, unresponsive, with nothing in common. You may not feel that you know me well enough for a decision. I will give you every opportunity to know me better--I will do nothing to deceive you--I will put on no veneer--I will let you know me as I really am. Will you say yes?"

He had left his seat and approached her; he was leaning close over her chair. While his words had suggested marriage on a purely intellectual basis he did not hesitate to bring his physical presence into the scale.

He was accustomed to having his way--he had always had it--never did he want it more than he did now.... And although he had made his plea from the intellectual angle he was sure, he was very, very sure there was more than that. This girl; whose very presence delighted him--intoxicated him--would have made him mad--

"Will you say yes?" he repeated, and his hands found hers and drew her with his great strength up from her chair. She did not resist, but when she was on her feet she avoided his embrace.

"You must not hurry me," she whispered. "I must have time to think. I did not realize what you were saying until--"

"Say yes now," he urged. Transley was a man very hard to resist. She felt as though she were in the grip of a powerful machine; it was as though she were being swept along by a stream against which her feeble strength was as nothing. Zen was as nearly frightened as she had ever been in her vigorous young life. And yet there was something delightful.

It would have been so easy to surrender--it was so hard to resist.

"Say yes now," he repeated, drawing her close at last and breathing the question into her ear. "You shall have time to think--you shall ask your own heart, and if it does not confirm your words you will be released from your promise."

They heard the footsteps of her father approaching, and Transley waited no longer for an answer. He turned her face to his; he pressed his lips against hers.

CHAPTER IX

Zen thought over the events of that evening until they became a blur in her memory. Her princ.i.p.al recollection was that she had been quite swept off her feet. Transley had interpreted her submission as a.s.sent, and she had not corrected him in the vital moment when they stood before her father that night in the deep shadow of the veranda.

"Y.D.," Transley had said, "your consent and your blessing! Zen and I are to be married as soon as she can be ready."

That was the moment at which she should have spoken, but she did not.

She, who had prided herself that she would make a race of it--she, who had always been able to slip out of a predicament in the nick of time--stood mutely by and let Transley and her father interpret her silence as consent. She was not sure that she was sorry; she was not sure but she would have consented anyway; but Transley had taken the matter quite out of her hands. And yet she could not bring herself to feel resentment toward him; that was the strangest part of it. It seemed that she had come under his domination; that she even had to think as he would have her think.

In the darkness she could not see her father's face, for which she was sorry; and he could not see hers, for which she was glad. There was a long moment of tense silence before she heard him say,

"Well, well! I had a hunch it might come to that, but I didn't reckon you youngsters would work so fast."

"This was a stake worth working fast for," Transley was saying, as he shook Y.D.'s hand. "I wouldn't trade places with any man alive." And Zen was sure he meant exactly what he said.

"She's a good girl, Transley," her father commented; "a good girl, even if a bit obstrep'rous at times. She's got spirit, Transley, an' you'll have to handle her with sense. She's a--a thoroughbred!"

Y.D. had reached his arms toward his daughter, and at these words he closed them about her. Zen had never known her father to be emotional; she had known him to face matters of life and death without the quiver of an eyelid, but as he held her there in his arms that night she felt his big frame tremble. Suddenly she had a powerful desire to cry. She broke from his embrace and ran upstairs to her room.

When she came down her father and mother and Transley were sitting about the table in the living-room; the room hung with trophies of the chase and of compet.i.tion; the room which had been the nucleus of the Y.D.

estate. There was a colored cover on the table, and the shaded oil lamp in the centre sent a comfortable glow of light downward and about.

The mammoth shadows of the three people fell on the log walls, darting silently from position to position with their every movement.

Her mother arose as Zen entered the room and took her hands in a warm, tender grip.

"You're early leaving us," she said. "I'm not saying I object. I think Mr. Transley will make you a good husband. He is a man of energy, like your father. He will do well. You will not know the hardships that we knew in our early married life." Their eyes met, and there was a moment's pause.

"You will not understand for many years what this means to me, Zenith,"

her mother said, and turned quickly to her place at the table.

She could not remember what they had talked about after that. She had been conscious of Transley's eyes often on her, and of a certain spiritual exaltation within her. She could not remember what she had said, but she knew she had talked with unusual vivacity and charm. It was as though certain storehouses of brilliance in her being, of which she had been unaware, had been suddenly opened to her. It was as though she had been intoxicated by a very subtle wine which did not deaden, but rather quickened, all her faculties.

Afterwards, she had spent long hours among the foothills, thinking and thinking. There were times when the flame of that strange exaltation burned low indeed; times when it seemed almost to expire. There were moments--hours--of misgivings. She could not understand the strange docility which had come over her; the unprecedented willingness to have her course shaped by another. That strange willingness came as near to frightening Zen as anything had ever done. She felt that she was being carried along in a stream; that she was making no resistance; that she had no desire to resist. She had a strange fear that some day she would need to resist; some day she would mightily need qualities of self-direction, and those qualities would refuse to arise at her command.

She did not fear Transley. She believed in him. She believed in his ability to grapple with anything that stood in his way; to thrust it aside, and press on. She respected the judgment of her father and her mother, and both of them believed in Transley. He would succeed; he would seize the opportunities this young country afforded and rise to power and influence upon them. He would be kind, he would be generous.

He would make her proud of him. What more could she want?

That was just it. There were dark moments when she felt that surely there must be something more than all this. She did not know what it was--she could not a.n.a.lyze her thoughts or give them definite form--but in these dark moments she feared that she was being tricked, that the whole thing was a sham which she would discover when it was too late.

She did not suspect her mother, or her father, or Transley, one or all, of being parties to this trick; she believed that they did not know it existed. She herself did not know it existed. But the fear was there.

After a week she admitted, much against her will, that possibly Dennison Grant had something to do with it. She had not seen him since she had pressed his fingers and he had ridden away through the smoke-haze of the South Y.D. She had dutifully tried to force him from her mind. But he would not stay out of it. It was about that fact that her misgivings seemed most to centre. When she would be thinking of Transley, and wondering about the future, suddenly she would discover that she was not thinking of Transley, but of Dennison Grant. These discoveries shocked and humiliated her. It was an impossible position. She would throw Grant forcibly out of her mind and turn to Transley. And then, in an unguarded moment, Transley would fade from her consciousness, and she would know again that she was thinking of Grant.

At length she allowed herself the luxury of thinking frankly about Dennison Grant. It WAS a luxury. It brought her a secret happiness which she was wholly at a loss to understand, but which was very delightful, nevertheless. She amused herself with comparing Grant with Transley.

They had two points in common: their physical perfection and their fearless, self-confident manner. With these exceptions they seemed to be complete contradictions. The ambitious Transley worshipped success; the philosophical Grant despised it. That difference in att.i.tude toward the world and its affairs was a ridge which separated the whole current of their lives. It even, in a way, shut one from the view of the other; at least it shut Grant from the view of Transley. Transley would never understand Grant, but Grant might, and probably did, understand Transley. That was why Grant was the greater of the two....

She reproached herself for such a thought; it was disloyal to admit that this stranger on the Landson ranch was a greater man than her husband-to-be. And yet honesty--or, perhaps, something deeper than honesty--compelled her to make that admission.... She ran back over the remembered incidents of the night they had spent together, marooned like shipwrecked sailors on a rock in the foothills. His attentiveness, his courtesy, his freedom from any conventional restraint, his manly respect which was so much greater than conventional restraint--all these came back to her with a poignant tenderness. She pictured Transley in his place. Transley would probably have proposed even before he bandaged her ankle. Grant had not said a word of love, or even of affection. He had talked freely of himself--at her request--but there had been nothing that might not have been said before the world. She had been safe with Grant....

After she had thought on this theme for a while Zen would acknowledge to herself that the situation was absurd and impossible. Grant had given no evidence of thinking more of her than of any other girl whom he might have met. He had been chivalrous only. She had sat up with a start at the thought that there might be another girl.... Or there might be no girl. Grant was an unusual character....

At any rate, the thing for her to do was to forget about him. She should have no place in her mind for any man but Transley. It was true he had stampeded her, but she had accepted the situation in which she found herself. Transley was worthy of her--she had nothing to take back--she would go through with it.

On the principle that the way to drive an unwelcome thought out of the mind is to think vigorously about something else, Zen occupied herself with plans and day-dreams centering about the new home that was to be built in town. Neither her father nor Transley had as yet returned from the trip on which they had gone with a view to forming a partnership, so there had been no opportunity to discuss the plans for the future, but Zen took it for granted that Transley would build in town. He was so enthusiastic over the possibilities of that young and bustling centre of population that there was no doubt he would want to throw in his lot with it. This prospect was quite pleasing to the girl; it would leave her within easy distance of her old home; it would introduce her to a type of society with which she was well acquainted, and where she could do herself justice, and it would not break up the a.s.sociations of her young life. She would still be able, now and again, to take long rides through the tawny foothills; to mingle with her old friends; possibly to maintain a somewhat sisterly acquaintance with Dennison Grant....