She, too, drew herself up with a sudden stiffness and would have turned away, but he was prompter.

"Hit 'pears like no woman won't hev him! I reckon I don't blame 'em none, nuther. I disgusts ther feller my own self," and before she could gather any key to the extraordinary incident, he had gone trudging on, mumbling the while into his unshaven beard.

Anne walked perplexedly homeward, and out of it all she could winnow only one kernel of comprehensible detail. Obviously she had met an enemy of Boone's, and yet she had heard Mr. McCalloway speak with warmth of the neighbourly kindness of Cyrus Spradling.

When she entered the house her father was sitting before the hearth, somewhat emaciated after his tedious convalescence, and his eyes followed her with a wistful dependence as she measured his medicine and rearranged the pillows at his back.

When, finally, she, too, drew a chair close to the blaze, the man said seriously:

"When your mother was your age, Anne, you had been born."

To this statistical announcement, the obvious response being denied by kindness, she made no answer. Perhaps she could not help reflecting had her mother been more deliberate, many years of discontent might have been escaped.

"My family has little to thank me for," observed Masters at last, with a candour that the daughter found embarra.s.sing. "Conversely, I dare say, I have little claim to expect much--and yet even life's derelicts are subject to human emotions."

"For instance, Daddy?"

"Tom Wallifarro stands pretty close to his allotment of three score and ten," came the thoughtful answer. "Neither your mother nor I is exactly young. It would be a comfort to think of you as settled, with your own life plans drawn and arranged."

The girl smiled up at him from her low chair. "Daddy," she said softly, "you know what I'm waiting for. You're the one person of my own blood that I can take into full confidence, because you're the only one who doesn't think of my life as a piece of cloth to be cut and fitted to Morgan's measure, whether it suits me or not. You've never said much, but I've known you were on my side."

For the first time in her memory her father was not immediately responsive. His hand falling on her bright head rested there with a dubious touch, and his eyes were irresolutely clouded.

"I wonder, dear," he said slowly, "whether, after all, I don't agree with the others--in part, at least. All my life I've been an insurgent, scorning the caution of the provident, and paying a beastly stiff price for my mutiny against smugly accepted rules of the game."

"A woman has only one life to share," she answered firmly. "It's not exactly insurgency to insist on loving the man."

After a little he inquired, "You _are_ fond of Morgan, though, aren't you? If there were no Boone Wellver, for instance, you might even love him, mightn't you?"

"There is a Boone, though." She spoke quietly but with a finality that seemed to close the doors upon discussion, and a silence followed.

Finally, however, Larry Masters cleared his throat in an embarra.s.sed fashion. "I spoke a while back of wanting to see you protected in the shelter of a home. Since we've embarked on the subject, I'm going to tell you something more. A certain truth has been carefully withheld from you, and I believe you ought to know it."

"What truth?" Her eyes widened a little, and the man shifted his position uneasily.

"The true realization of how deeply we all stand in Tom Wallifarro's debt," he made blunt response.

"I've always known," she hastily declared, "that he's been a fairy G.o.dfather, and given me things--luxurious things--that mother's income couldn't run to."

Larry Masters laughed with a shade of bitterness.

"Your mother has never had any income, Anne. As for myself, there's never been a time since you were a baby when I could make buckle and tongue meet. That's the whole ugly truth. House-rent, clothes, food, education, everything, necessities as well as comforts, livelihood as well as luxuries--the whole lot and parcel have come to my wife and my daughter from the generous hand of Tom Wallifarro. But for that, G.o.d knows what their lives would have been."

Anne Masters rose and stood unsteadily on the rag rug before the stone flaggings of the hearth.

"You mean ... that we ... have ... been actual dependents on his kindness--that we've just been ... charity ... parasites?"

The girl's hands came to her bosom and a shiver ran through her. The warm flood of colour left her cheeks, and her eyes were deep with chagrined amazement.

The man did not answer the questions, and she went on with another:

"Do you mean ... for I must know ... that we've lived as we have on nothing but ... generous charity?... That he's been paying all these years what it cost ... to raise me properly ... for his son?"

"Hold on, Anne--" The convalescent raised an admonitory hand. "There's danger of doing people who love you a grave injustice. Tom Wallifarro would go to his grave with his lips sealed, though torture were used to open them, before he would seek to coerce you or make you unhappy. If you've never been told the facts, it was because he preferred that there should be no burdensome sense of obligation."

"But always," Anne insisted faintly, as though oppressed by poignant physical pain, "he has done these things ... with the one ... idea ...

that I was to be ... his son's wife."

"I should rather say," quietly amended Larry Masters, "with that dream and hope."

"And, Mother," she asked, in a strangely strained voice, "Mother has a.s.sured him that ... when the time comes ... she could ... deliver the goods?"

Larry had seen Anne in childhood transports of pa.s.sion, but never before cold and white in such a stillness of wrath as that which transformed her now. Her eyes made him feel the accomplice in some monstrous traffic upon his daughter's womanhood, and it was difficult to remain complacent under her cross-examining.

"Your mother has had the same dream and hope. If the marriage was not repugnant to you, I dare say it would take cavilling to criticize it."

"You don't see, then ..."--the girl felt suddenly faint and dizzy as she moved a little to the side and leaned inertly against the wall--"you don't see that the very chivalry of Uncle Tom's conduct ... enslaves me a ... hundred times ... more strongly ... than a cruder effort to force me? You don't see that ... he's paid for me ... and that if Boone came today ... with a marriage license ... I couldn't marry him ... without feeling that I must buy ... myself back first?"

"That, of course, my dear, is a morbid and distorted view."

"Is it? Haven't I eaten the food and worn out the clothes and acquired the education that were all only items of an investment for Morgan's future? Haven't I used these payments made on that investment only to take them away from him and give them to some one else? I haven't even been given the chance of protest against these chains of d.a.m.nable kindness."

"You seem, my dear, to have given your heart to Boone, and that settles it, I suppose. I might wish it otherwise--Tom and your mother may still cling to the other hope, but--"

"You say I've given my heart to Boone," she interrupted fiercely, "but I find that it wasn't mine to give. I find that I wasn't a free agent. I had already been mortgaged and remortgaged for things not only used by me but by my mother, and--" She paused, and Masters added with a twisted smile of chagrin,

"Yes--and your father."

"But how about Boone?" she demanded. "What of the debt owed to him? Did they have the right to barter off his happiness as well as mine?"

"Tom Wallifarro," her father gravely reminded her, "has been a benefactor to Boone. Tom Wallifarro has not complained. Moreover, the wounds of youth are not quite so fatal as they seem when one suffers them. If they were, few men would live to middle-age. I dare say Boone would survive even if he lost you."

Anne's brain was dizzy and stunned. Mortification and wretchedness were blurring the focus of her vision, and this suggestion that after all she was exaggerating her importance in Boone Wellver's life seemed the dictum she could not allow to pa.s.s unchallenged. With an instinctive lashing out of her hot emotions she pitched the battle on that single issue, an issue which seemed to determine whether after all she was fighting in fairness and clean conscience for independence, or only clinging to a selfishness that trod toward its gratification on the happiness of others.

"Prove that to me," she retorted in the same cold fury. "Prove that he doesn't need me and that I'm thinking only of myself, and I'll marry anybody you say. I'll obediently deliver myself over and say, 'Here's your marriageable a.s.set. Do what you like with it.'"

Her words had not been torrential, but glacially cold and hard under the congealing pressure of indignation, but now the tone broke into something like a sob, as she declared:

"Boone has had only one girl in his life. His whole scheme has been built about me. Show me that a love like that is only a whim, and I'll agree that this chattel idea of marriage is as good as any other, and I'll submit to it."

Swiftly Larry Masters repressed a smile. Anne, he reflected, did not realize how often that refurbished fiction has been retailed as an axiom by young hearts in equinox.

"Why did you smile, Father?" she demanded militantly, and he shook his heed.

"I was only reflecting," he a.s.sured her, "that every girl thinks that of every man she loves."

"Do you know of anything to disprove it in the present case?"

"Since you ask," he made hesitant reply, "I did hear some unsubstantiated rumours hereabouts that he had proposed and been rejected by a mountain girl--Cyrus Spradling's daughter."