ISS MELHUISH rose, stifled a yawn in her sensitive nostrils, and began to strip her gloves.
“And that's all for to-day, thank goodness. I hate business,” she announced definitively.
The Westerner smiled. “That's not quite all. There's another matter.”
She waited—her brilliant look flashing on him—a dainty, slender, young patrician with all youth's graces and none of its illusions.
“It's something personal, to myself,” he explained.
“Oh!”
She looked sharply at him, a suggestion of hauteur in her manner.
“I expect to leave for Montana to-night. I'll probably not be in the East again till Fall.”
“Indeed.”
The cool indifference of her voice might have daunted a less determined man, but this one did not have his close-gripped square jaw and steel-gray eyes for nothing. A born fighter, he had survived and come to the top because of the stark bulldog courage in him.
“I'm a self-made man, Miss Melhuish. I began as a street waif and I've been pretty nearly everything since from a steam-boat roustabout and the cook in a cow-camp to what I am now.”
“It's very creditable, I'm sure, Mr. Brand,” she murmured with a chill abstraction.
“I'm not boasting. I'm telling you this about myself because it may seem to you to have a bearing on what I am to say. Will you marry me, Miss Melhuish?”
“No, thank you, Mr. Brand,” she answered in the same careless tone with which she would have declined an ice.
“Why not?”
“Because—” She broke off and glanced at him with fine contempt. “I prefer not to.”
Brand held an even temper. “I understand that. What I am trying to get at is: What do you object to in me?”
It was on her tongue tip to say “Everything,” but she found a more crushing answer. “I don't object to anything. Why should I, since I don't know you?”
She glanced casually at the clock, but the Westerner was impervious to hints. He did not mean to leave till he was ready.
“That can be remedied,” he suggested.
“I hardly think it necessary.”
“You haven't yet told me your reasons.”
She tapped the polished floor impatiently with her suede shoe
“I have said I don't care to. Isn't that reason enough?”
“Not quite, under the circumstances. I understand, of course, that I don't belong to your set. I'm not even a college man. All the education I have was picked up in the outdoor school of life that holds sessions twelve months in the year. Is that what you object to?”
She considered, frowningly, this big masterful man who had to have reasons, and the more she thought of it the greater grew her resentment. It came flaming into her cheeks in a wave of color.
“You're the fifth man that has proposed to me this summer, Mr. Brand. One of them had seen me only three times.”
“That doesn't surprise me,” he smiled. “This is the sixth time I have seen you.”
“All of them knew the extent of my fortune.”
“Ought that to have deterred them if they loved you?”
She laughed scornfully. “Love—fiddlesticks.”
“You mean, of course, that I'm asking you for your money.”
“Baldly but accurately, that's just what I mean.”
He swept her with a critical eye that took in the figure of slim suppleness, the dainty provoking face of spirit and intelligence.
Then, “I'm disappointed in you,” he told her.
This brought a surprised “Why?” from her.
“Yet I needn't be. It's the way you've been brought up. The whole emphasis of your environment has been upon money. It's the standard of worth in your set. Its possession covers a multitude of faults.”
“In me?” she asked, silkily.
“Yes, in you. You've been spoiled ever since you were a baby. Whatever you cried for you got, and of course you came to think you were the most important creature on the planet. That is natural.”
“It is very kind of you, a stranger, to go to so much trouble to tell me this,” she said with soft irony, but nevertheless she was aware of a faint thrill of excitement stealing through her.
“When you needed spanking you didn't get it. When you needed plain talk you got soft soap. I'm going to tell you the truth for a change.”
Standing before her solidly on both feet, tall, loose-limbed and easy, he looked so vigorous and sure of himself that her sense of superiority knew a little shock of doubt.
“Please do,” she said with mock humility.