"Reputations!" she said chokingly. "Yours can stand it, perhaps--but what of me? You cannot be serious, you cannot! Why, it is my name, my life, my everything! . . . You made me come this way. Always I wanted you to go another way, but no, you were sure, you told me to trust to you. And then you pretended to care for me--do you think I would have tolerated your arm about me for one instant if I had not believed it was forever? Oh, if my father were here you would talk differently! Have you no honor? None? . . . Every one knew there was an--an affair of the heart growing between us, and then for us two to disappear--this night alone----"
Her voice kept breaking off. She could not control it or the tears that ran down her face in the darkness. She was a choking, crying wild thing.
Desperately she forced one last insistence, "Oh, you must, you must!"
"Must nothing," Byrd answered her savagely. "What kind of scheme is this, anyhow? I've had a few things tried before but this beats the Dutch. I don't know how much of this talk you mean but I'll tell you right now, young lady, nobody can tie me up for life with any such stuff. Father! Honor! Scandal! Believe me, little one, you've got the wrong number."
"You bet I dare refuse. There's no sense to all this. Nobody's going to think the worse of you because you got lost with me--and if you're trying to put anything over, you might as well stop now."
Maria Angelina stopped. It seemed to her that she should die of shame.
Dazedly she stood and looked at him through the darkness out of which a few drops of rain were again falling.
"You just forget it and get a bit of rest," Johnny Byrd advised brusquely. "Hurry in out of the wet. That thing's going to leak again," and he nodded jerkily up at the sky.
He tugged open the door, and stricken as a wounded creature crawling to shelter Maria Angelina bent her head and stumbled across the threshold.
"In you go," he said with a more cheerful air. "Wrap yourself up as warm as you can and I'll follow----"
She was within the doorway when these words came. She turned and saw that he was stooping to enter.
"I shall do quite well, Signor," she found her voice quickly to say. "You need not come in."
"Need not----?" He appeared caught with fresh amazement. "Judas, where do you think I'm going to stay? Out in the rain?"