"Well, I shouldn't," said Francis penitently. "Only I'm relieved, and a little excited, I suppose. You see, I like your society a lot, and the idea of having it for maybe three months, on any terms you like, is making me so pleased I'm making flippant remarks. I won't any more, if I remember."

And he apparently meant it, for he busied himself in exploring the car, which seemed as inexhaustible as the Mother's Bag in the Swiss Family Robinson, for the food he had spoken of. There was a large basket, which he produced and set on a stump, and from which he took sandwiches, thermos flasks, and--last perfidy of Lucille!--a tin box of shrimps a la King, carefully wrapped, and ready for reheating. He did it in a little ready-heat affair which also emerged from the basket, and which Marjorie knew well. It was her own, in fact. Reheated shrimps should have killed them both, more especially for breakfast.

But they never thought of that till some days later. Marjorie was so overcome by finding her own shrimps facing her, so to speak, that nothing else occurred to her--except to eat them. They made a very good breakfast, during which Francis was never flippant once. They talked decorously about the natural scenery--fortunately for the conversation there was a great deal of natural scenery in their vicinity--and somewhat about pup-tents, and a little about how nice the weather was. After that they cleared up the pieces, repacked everything like magic, and went on their way very amicably.

CHAPTER IV

"And now that things are more or less settled, wouldn't you like to know what we are going to do?" inquired Francis.

"Haven't I anything to do with it?" inquired Marjorie, not crossly, but as one seeking information.

"Almost everything. But you don't know the road to Canada. I thought we'd take it straight through in the car, but to-night we will be in more civilized parts--in an hour or so, in fact--and you can get straightened up a little--not that you look as if you needed to, but after a night in the open one does feel more or less tossed about, I imagine."

Marjorie considered. Ordinarily at this hour she would be walking into the office. She would be speaking with what politeness one can muster up in the morning to Miss Kaplan, who was quite as exuberant at five as at seven in the evening; she would be hoping desperately that she wasn't late, and that if she was she would escape Mr. Wildhack, who glared terrifyingly at such young women who didn't get down on schedule time. Marjorie was not much on schedule time, but she always felt that the occasions when she got there too late really ought to be balanced by those when she came too early. Instead of all this, she was racing north with the fresh wind blowing against her face, with no duties and no responsibilities, and something that, but for the person who shared it with her, promised to be rather fun. Just then something came to her. She had an engagement for tea with Bradley Logan.

Suddenly that engagement seemed exceedingly important, and something that she should on no account have missed. But at least she could write to him and explain.

"Have you a fountain-pen?" she inquired of Francis, "and can I write sitting here?"

"If you don't mind writing on a leaf from my notebook. It's all I have."

She was privately a little doubtful as to the impression that such a note would make on Mr. Logan, for she remembered one wild tale she had heard from him about a man who spent his whole life in a secluded room somewhere in France, experimenting on himself as to what sort of perfumes and colors and gestures made him happiest. None of them had made him happy at all, to the best of her remembrance; but the idea Mr.

Logan left her with was that he was that sort of person himself, and that the wrong kind of letter-paper could make him suffer acutely. She was amused at it, really, but a bit impressed, too. One doesn't want to be thought the kind of person who does the wrong thing because of knowing no better. Still, it was that or nothing.

"Dear Mr. Logan," she began, more illegibly than she knew because of the car's motion, "I am so sorry that I have not been able to tell you in advance that I couldn't take tea with you. But Mr. Ellison has taken me away rather suddenly. He had to go to Canada to take a position. We hope we will see you when we get back."

She did not know till much later that owing to the thank-you-ma'am which they reached simultaneously with the word "suddenly" that when Mr. Logan got that note he thought it was "severely," and that the bad penmanship and generally disgraceful appearance of the loose-leaf sheet, the jerky hand, and the rather elderly envelope which was all Francis could find--it had been living in a pocket with many other things for some time--gave him a wrong idea. Mr. Logan, to antic.i.p.ate a little, by this erroneous means, acquired an idea very near the truth. He thought that Marjorie Ellison was being kidnapped against her will, and made it the subject of much meditation. His nervous ailment prevented him from dashing after her.

Marjorie fortunately knew nothing of all this, for she was proud to the core, and she would rather have died than let any one but Lucille, of necessity in on it, know anything but that she was spending the most delightful and willing of honeymoons.

So when they found a little up-state town with a tavern of exceeding age and stiffness, and alighted in search of luncheon, the landlord and landlady thought just what Marjorie wanted them to think; that all was well and very recent.

She sank into one of the enormous walnut chairs, covered with immaculate and flaring tidies which reminded her of Cousin Anna and stuck into the back of her neck, and viewed the prospect with pleasure.

For the moment she almost forgot Francis, and the problem of managing just the proper distance from him. There was a stuffed fish, gla.s.sy-eyed and with cotton showing from parts of him, over the counter. There were bills of forgotten railroads framed and hung in different places. There was a crayon portrait of a graduated row of children from the seventies hung over the fireplace, four of them, on the order of another picture, framed and hanging in another part of the room, and called "A Yard of Kittens." Marjorie wondered with pleasure why they hadn't added enough children to bring it up to a yard, and balanced things properly. The fireplace itself was bricked up, all except a small place where a Franklin stove sat, with immortelles sticking out of its top as if they aimed at being fuel. Marjorie had seen immortelles in fireplaces before, but in a Franklin they were new to her. She made up her mind to find out about it before she was through.

"Why--why, I'm not worrying about being carried off by Francis!" she remembered suddenly. She had been quite forgetful of him, and of anything but the funny, old-fashioned place she was in. She lay back further in the walnut chair, quite sleepily.

"Would you like to go upstairs now, ma'am?" the landlord said. She looked around for Francis, but he was nowhere to be seen. She picked up the handkerchief which had slipped from her lap, cast a regretful look at the yard of kittens, and followed him.

"Here it is, ma'am," said the landlord, and set the suitcase he had been carrying down inside the door. She shut the door after her, and made for the mirror. Then she said "Oh!" in a surprised voice, because Francis was standing before it, brushing his hair much harder than such straight black hair needed to be brushed.

He seemed as much surprised as she.

"Good heavens, I beg your pardon, Marjorie!" he said. "This isn't your room. Yours is the next one."

"I beg _your_ pardon, then," said Marjorie, with a certain iciness.

"You can have this one if you like it better. They're next door to each other. You know"--Francis colored--"we have to seem more or less friendly. Really I didn't know----"

He was moving away into the other room as he spoke, having laid down his brush on her bureau as if he had no business with it at all.

"This isn't my brush," she said, standing at the connecting door and holding it out at arm's length.

"No," said Francis. "I didn't know I'd left it. Thank you."

He took it from her, and went into his own room. She pushed the door to between them, and went slowly back and sat down on the bed. A quite new idea had just come to her.

Francis wasn't a relentless Juggernaut, or a tyrant, or a cave-man, or anything like that really. That is, he probably did have moments of being all of them. But besides that--it was a totally new idea--he was a human being like herself. Sometimes things embarra.s.sed him; sometimes they were hard for him; he didn't always know what to do next.

She had never had any brothers, and not very much to do with men until she got old enough for them to make love to her. The result was that it had never occurred to her particularly that men were people. They were just--men. That is, they were people you had nothing in common with except the fact that you did what they said if they were fathers, or married them when the time came, if they weren't. But she had actually felt sorry for Francis; not sorry, in a vague, rather pitying way because she didn't love him--but sorry for him as if he had been Lucille, when he was so embarra.s.sed that he walked off forgetting his own brush. She smiled a little at the remembrance. She really began to feel that he was a friend.

So when he tapped at her outside door presently and told her that luncheon was ready, and that they had better go down and eat it, instead of the severity for which Francis had braced himself, she smiled at him in a very friendly fashion, and they went down together, admiring the wallpaper intensely on their way, for it consisted of fat scarlet birds sitting on concentric circles, and except for its age was almost exactly like some that Lucille and Marjorie hadn't bought because it was two dollars a yard.

Luncheon proved to be dinner, but they were none the less glad of it for that. And instead of freezing every time the landlord was tactlessly emotional, Marjorie found that she could be amused at it, and that her being amused helped Francis to be amused.

She always looked back tenderly to that yard of kittens, and to those other many yards of impossible and scarlet birds. They gave her the first chance at carrying through her wild flight with Francis decently and without too much discomfort.

The rest of the trip to Canada was easier and easier. Once admitting that Francis and she were friends--and you can't spend three days traveling with anybody without being a friend or an enemy--she had a nice enough time. She kept sternly out of her mind the recollection that he was in love with her. When she thought of that she couldn't like him very much. But then she didn't have to think of it.

"Here we are," said Francis superfluously as they stopped at the door of a big house that was neither a log cabin nor a regular house.

Marjorie gave a sigh of contentment.

"I admit I'm glad to get here," she said.

She slipped out of the car in the sunset, and stood drooping a minute, waiting for her bag to be lifted down. She was beginning to feel tired. She was lonely, too. She missed everything acutely and all at once--New York, the little apartment, Lucille, being free from Francis--even the black kitten seemed to her something that she could not live one moment longer without. She turned and looked at Francis, trim and alert as ever, just steering the car around the side of the house, and found herself hating him for the moment. He was so at home here. And she hadn't even carfare to run away if she wanted to!

"Well, now, you poor lamb!" said somebody's rich, motherly voice with a broad Irish brogue. "You're tired enough to die, and no wonder. Come along with me, darlin'."

She looked up with a feeling of comfort into the face of a black-haired, middle-aged Irishwoman, ample and beaming.

"I'm Mrs. O'Mara, an' I know yer husband well. I kep' house for him an' the other young gintlemen when they were workin' up here before the fightin' began. So he got me to come an' stay wid the two of ye, me an' Peggy. An' I don't deny I'm glad to see ye, for there does be a ghost in this house!"

The ending was so unexpected and matter-of-fact that Marjorie forgot to feel lost and estranged, and even managed to laugh. Even a ghost sounded rather pleasant and friendly, and it was good to see a woman's face. Who or what Peggy might be she did not know or care. Mrs.

O'Mara picked up the suitcase with one strong arm, and, putting the other round Marjorie in a motherly way, half led her into the house.

"Ye'll excuse me familiarity, but it's plain to see ye're dead, Miss--ma'am, I mean. Come yer ways in to the fire."

Marjorie had been feeling that life would be too hard to bear if she had to climb any stairs now; so it was very gladly that she let Mrs.

O'Mara establish her in a rude chaise-longue sort of thing, facing a huge fire in a roughly built fireplace. The housekeeper bent over her, loosening knots and taking off wraps in a very comforting way. Then she surrounded her with pillows--not too many, or too much in her way--and slipped from the room to return in a moment with tea.

Marjorie drank it eagerly, and was revived by it enough to look around and see the place where she was to dwell. It looked very attractive, though it was not in the least like anything she had ever seen.

Where she lay she stared straight into a fire of great logs that crackled and burned comfortingly. The mantel over it was roughly made of wood, and its only adornment was a pipe at one side, standing up on its end in some mysterious manner, and a pile of Government reports at the other. The walls were plastered and left so. Here and there were tacked photographs and snapshots, and along one wall--she had to screw her neck to see it--some one had fastened up countless sheets from a Sunday supplement--war photographs entirely. She wondered who had done it, because what she had seen of returned soldiers had shown her that the last thing they wanted to see or hear about was the war.

There were couches around the walls, the other chairs were lounging chairs also. There was fishing-tackle in profusion, and a battered phonograph on a table. It looked as if men had made themselves comfortable there, without thinking much about looks. The only thing against this was one small frilled chair. It was a most absurd chair, rustic to begin with, with a pink cushion covered with white net and ruffled, and pink ribbons anchoring another pink and net cushion at its back. Mrs. O'Mara, hovering hospitably, saw Marjorie eying it, and beamed proudly.