"Well, she is, if ye call it silly," said Mrs. O'Mara from where she stood with her partner in all the glory of a maroon satin that fitted her as if she were an upholstered sofa. "I'd no more go live in that clearin' with the Wendigees, or whatever 'tis the Canucks talk about, than in Purgatory itself. Wendigees is Injun goblins," she explained to her partner, "and there's worse nor them, too."

She crossed herself expertly, and in almost the same movement swept her partner, not of the tallest, away in a fox-trot. She fox-trotted very well.

Marjorie went on dancing, and hoping that Mr. Logan would go to bed and to sleep, or have a fit of nerves that would incapacitate him from further interfering with her. But the hope was in vain, for Francis appeared from nowhere in about fifteen minutes, and beckoned her to follow him to where she knew Logan was waiting.

The two men sat down gravely in the little wooden room where Logan had been shown. It was Francis who spoke first.

"Mr. Logan insists, Marjorie, that you appealed to him for rescue. He puts it to me, I must say, very reasonably, that no sensible man would travel all this way to bring back a girl unless she had asked him to.

He says that you wrote him that you were being treated severely."

"I didn't! I never did!" exclaimed outraged Marjorie, springing up and standing before them. "Show me my letter!"

"Unfortunately," said Mr. Logan wistfully, "I destroyed it, because I have always found that the wisest thing to do with letters. But I am prepared to take my oath that you wrote me, asking me to help you. I am extremely sorry to find that you are in such a position as to--forgive me, Mr. Ellison, but it seems rather like it--to be so dominated by this gentleman as not to even admit----"

"You see what it looks like," broke in Francis, turning to his wife furiously. "Never ask me to believe you again. I don't trust you--I never will trust you. n.o.body will, if you keep on as you've begun. Go back with him, then--you're not my slave, much as you may pretend it."

"I won't!" said Marjorie spiritedly. "I've had enough of this. I'll stay here, if it takes ten years, till you admit that you've treated me horribly, and misjudged me. I've played fair. I've no way of proving it, against you two men, but I have! I'll prove it by any test you like."

"There's only one way you can convince me that one word you've said since you came up here was the truth," he told her, suddenly quiet and cold. "If you stay, of your own free will, out there in the clearing; if you take over the work that Pierre fell down on this evening, and stay there looking after me and my men--I'll believe you. There's no fun to doing that, just work; it stands to reason that you wouldn't do that for any reason unless to clear yourself. If you don't want to do that, you may go home with this gentleman; indeed, I won't let you do anything else. Take your choice."

Marjorie looked at him for a moment as if she wanted to do something violent to him. Then she spoke.

CHAPTER VII

"I see what you mean," she said. "I wasn't sporting in the first place--I wouldn't live up to my bargain. That's made you more apt to believe that I've been acting the same way ever since. You don't think I can see _any_thing through. Well--not particularly for your sake--more for my own, I guess--I'm going to see this through, if I die doing it. I'll stay--and take Pierre's place, Francis."

Francis's severe young face did not change at all.

"Very well," he said.

"But you understand," she went on, "that I'm not doing this to win anything but my own self-respect. And at the end of the three months, of course, I shall go back to New York. And you'll let me go, and see that I get free."

"I wouldn't do anything else for the world," said Francis in the same unmoved voice.

"Very well, then--we understand each other." She turned to Logan, who had sprung to his feet and tried to interfere a couple of times while she talked. "And please remember that this arrangement does not go beyond us three," she said. "I would prefer that no one else knew how matters stood."

Logan looked a little baffled. He was ten years older than either of them, but so many actual clashing things happening had never come his way before. His ten years' advantage had been spent writing stylistic essays, and such do not fit one for stepping down into the middle of a lot of primitive young emotions. He felt suddenly helpless before these pa.s.sionate, unjust, emotional young people. He felt a little forlorn, too, as if the main currents of things had been sweeping them by while he stood carefully on the bank, trying not to get his feet wet. A very genuine emotion of pity for Marjorie had brought him up here, pity more mixed with something else than he had been willing to admit. It was the first thing he had done for a long, long time that was romantic and unconsidered and actual. And it appeared that, after all, he wasn't needed. Concentration on the nuances of minor fifteenth-century poets had unfitted him for being swept on, as these had been, by the world-currents. They had married each other, pushed by the mating instinct in the air--the world's insistence on marriage to balance the death that had swept it. Now they were struggling to find their balance against each other, to be decent, to be fair, to make themselves and each other what they thought they ought to be. He could see what they were doing and why much more clearly than they could themselves. But he couldn't be a part of it--he had stood aside from life too long, with his nerves and his pa.s.sion for artistic details and pleasures of the intellect.

But he bowed quietly, and smiled a little. He felt suddenly very tired.

"Certainly it shall go no farther," he a.s.sured her. "And I owe you an apology for the trouble which I fear I have ignorantly brought upon you. If there is anything I can say----"

She shook her head proudly, and Francis, fronting them both, made a motion of negation, too.

"You must be tired," he added to his gesture. "Or would you care to watch the dancers awhile?"

"No, I thank you," said Mr. Logan courteously in his turn. "If you will tell me of some near-by hotel----"

"There's only this," explained Francis. "But I think your room is ready by now. Miss O'Mara--I'll call her--will show you to it."

Peggy, summoned by a signal whistle from the ballroom, convoyed Logan upstairs with abundant good-will and much curiosity. She had never seen any one like him before, and took in his looks and belongings with the intense and frank absorption of an Indian. Indeed, as she explained to Marjorie, whom she met at the foot of the stairs, it was only by the help of the saints and her own good decency that she didn't follow him into his room and stay there to watch him unpack.

"With the charming, purry voice he has, and all the little curlicues when he finishes his words, and the little cane--does he never sleep without it, would you say?--and the little Latin books he reads----"

But here Marjorie pulled her up.

"How on earth do you know he reads little Latin books?"

Peggy flushed generously.

"Well, if you must know, I gave one teeny weeny peek through the crack in the door after I left him, and he was thrown down across his cot like a long, graceful tomcat or leopard or something, and he pulled a little green leather book out of his pocket and went to reading it on the spot. 'Pervigilium Veneris,' its name was. All down the side."

Marjorie had heard of it; in fact, in pursuance of her education Mr.

Logan had made her read several translations of it. It had bored her a little, but she had read it dutifully, because she had felt at that time that it would be nice to be intellectually widened, and because Logan had praised it so highly.

"Oh, yes, I know," she said.

"And is it a holy book?" Peggy inquired.

"Just a long Latin poem about people running around in the woods at night and having a sort of celebration of Venus's birthday," said Marjorie absently. It occurred to her Logan would have been worse shocked if he could have heard her offhand summing-up of his pet poem than he had been by her att.i.tude about going back to New York with him.

But she had more important things on her mind than Latin poetry. When Peggy met her she was on her way to go off and think them out.

"Good-night, Peggy," she said. "I'm going to bed. I have to get up early and go to work."

Peggy laughed.

"Don't talk nonsense. The dance isn't half over, and everybody's crazy to dance with you. You can sleep till the crack of doom to-morrow, and with not a soul to stop you."

Marjorie shook her head, smiling a little.

"No. I'm going over to the clearing to do the cooking for the men. I told Francis I would, tonight."

Peggy made the expected outcry.

"To begin with, I'll wager you can't cook--a little bit of a thing like you, that I could blow away with a breath! And you'd be all alone there. Mother won't do it because she's afraid of wraiths"--Peggy p.r.o.nounced it "wraths," and it was evidently a quotation from Mrs.

O'Mara--"and it would be twice as scary for you. Though, to be sure, I suppose you'd have Francis. I suppose that's your reason, the both of you--it sounds like the bossy sort of plan Francis makes."

This had not occurred to Marjorie. But she saw now that the only plausible reason not the truth that they could give for her taking Pierre's job was her desire to see more of her husband.

"Well, it's natural we should want to see more of each other," she began lamely.

"Oh, I suppose so," said Peggy offhandedly, and with one ear p.r.i.c.ked toward the music. "But when my time comes I hope I won't be that bad that I drag a poor girl off to do cooking, so I can see the more of her."

"You're getting your s.e.xes mixed," said Francis coolly, strolling up behind the girls. "Peggy, your partner is looking for you. I'll take you over after luncheon to-morrow, Marjorie."

"Very well," she said. "Good-night."