Had old Fitzpatrick possessed the eyes of Jean's few admirers, he would have laid the blame for his predicament on his angular first-born, where it belonged, and not on the perversity of young men in general.
"Look here, Jean," said Donald, after grave consideration. "You are old enough to think for yourself--twenty-four, aren't you?" The girl nodded assent.
"Well, then," he continued, "please don't remind me of what your father said last summer, if it is in opposition to our wishes and desires."
"I wouldn't if it was in opposition to them," she retorted, calmly. He looked at her with startled eyes, a sudden, breathless pain stabbing him.
"I mean, Donald," she replied, looking at him squarely with her fearless, truthful eyes, "that last summer was a mistake, as far as I am concerned."
"Jean!" McTavish rose to his feet unsteadily, his face white with pain. "Jean! What has happened? What have I done? What lies has anyone been telling you?" He spoke in a sharp voice; yet, even in the midst of his bewilderment, he could not but admire her straightforward cutting to the heart of the matter. There was no coquetry or false gentleness about her. That was the pattern of his own nature and he loved her the more for it.
She shrugged her shoulders in the way he adored, and smiled wanly.
"There's an Indian proverb that says, 'When the wind dies, there is no more music in the corn,'" she replied. "There is no more music in my heart, that is all."
"Evil reports about me?" he snarled suddenly, drawing down his dark brows, and fixing her with piercing eyes that had gone almost black.
"Not evil reports; merely half-baked rumors that, really, had very little to do with you, after all. Yet, they changed me." She was still wholly frank.
"Who carried them to you?" he demanded tensely, the muscles of his firm jaws tightening as his teeth clenched. "Tell me who spread them, and I'll run him to earth, if he leads me through the heart of Labrador."
"I don't know," she returned earnestly, rising in her turn. "That's the trouble with rumors. They're like a summer wind; they go everywhere unseen, but everyone hears them, and none can say out of which direction they first came or when they will cease blowing. I don't know."