Part 16 (2/2)
”I don't quite _savez_ the responsibility,” retorted the little lady, flippantly. ”But what do you imagine?”
”I don't imagine--I know. He found out, somehow, that she was going with us, and just dropped things and ran for it.”
”Do you think he did that?”
”Of course he did. And if we're not careful the odium of the whole thing will fall on us.”
”Well, what are you going to do about it?”
”I don't know. I suppose we ought to go back from Golden and take Miss Vennor along with us.”
”Wouldn't that be a.s.suming a great deal? You would hardly want to tell the President that you had brought his daughter back because you were afraid she might do something rash.”
”Oh, pshaw!” said Burton, who was rather out of his element in trying to pick his way among the social ploughshares.
”But that is what you will have to tell him, if we go back,” she insisted, with delicious effrontery.
Burton thought about it for a moment, and ended by accepting the fact merely because it was thrust upon him. ”I couldn't very well do that, you know,” he objected, and she nearly laughed in his face because he had fallen so readily into her small trap; ”but if we don't break it off, what shall we do?”
”Do? why, nothing at all! Mr. Vennor asks us to take his daughter with us on a little pleasure-trip, and he doesn't tell us to bring her back instanter if we happen to find Fred on the train.”
Burton was silenced, but he was very far from being convinced, and he gave up the return project reluctantly, promising himself that he should have a very uncomfortable day of it.
In the meantime, the two young people in the observation-car were making hard work of it. A good many undiscussable happenings had intervened between their parting and their meeting, and these interfered sadly with the march of a casual conversation. As usually befalls, it was the young woman who first rose superior to the embarra.s.sments.
”I'm glad of this day,” she said, frankly, when they had exhausted the scenery, the matchless morning, the crisp air, and half a dozen other commonplaces. ”I enjoyed our trip down from Silver Plume a year ago so much, and it seemed the height of improbability to imagine that we'd ever repeat it. Did you think we ever should?”
”No, indeed,” replied Brockway, truthfully; ”but I have wished many times that we might. Once in awhile, when I was a boy, I used to get a day that was all my own--a day in which I could go where I pleased and do as I liked. Those days are all marked with white stones now, and I often envy the boy who had them.”
”I think I can understand that.”
”Can you? I didn't know little girls ever had such days.”
”I've had a few, but I think they were never given me. They were usually stolen, and so were doubly precious.”
Brockway laughed. ”Suppose we call this a stolen day, and try to make it as much like the others as we can. Shall we?”
”It's a bargain,” she said, impulsively.
”From this minute, I am any irresponsible age you please; and you--you are to do nothing whatever that you meant to do. Will you agree to that?”
”Gladly,” Brockway a.s.sented, the more readily since his plans for the day had been so recently demolished and rebuilt. ”We'll go where we please, and do as we like; and for this one day n.o.body shall say 'Don't!'”
She laughed with him, and then became suddenly grave. ”It's no use; we can't do it,” she said, with mock pathos; ”the 'ancients and invalids'
won't let us.”
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