The Innocent Adventuress Part 29

He wondered now at the long struggle of his senses. He wondered at the death pangs of infatuation.

Once more he looked at the picture in a puzzled way as if to make sure that the thing he felt--and the thing he didn't feel--were indubitably real, and then he rose with a curious sense of lightness and yet sobriety, and, straightening his shoulders as if a burden had fallen from them, he retraced his steps towards the cabin.

At the doorway he paused, for he heard Maria Angelina singing. Then he spoke her name.

The song stopped. Maria Angelina turned towards him a face of flushed surprise. He discovered her quaintly with a jar of pickled frogs in her hand.

"Maria Angelina, what are you doing?"

"But these, Signor--what are these?"

"These? Oh--not for food, Maria Angelina--even in my most desperate moments. . . . Maria Angelina, are you going to marry him?"

She did not drop the frogs. Very carefully she put them back but with a shaking hand. All the rosy sparkle was swept out of her. Her eyes were averted. She looked suddenly hara.s.sed, stubborn, almost furtive.

No quick denial came springing from her.

"I do not know," she told him painfully.

"You do not know?"

There was something in the young man's voice that made her glance rise to his.

"Oh, it is not that I care for him!" said Maria Angelina ingenuously.

"Then why think of marrying him?"

"It may be--needful."

"Not after this story," Barry Elder, insisted.

"It is not that--now." She forced herself to meet his combative look.

"It is because of--Julietta."

"Julietta! . . . Who the deuce is Julietta?"

"Oh, she is my sister, my older sister. I told you about her last night," Maria Angelina reminded him. "She is the one I love so much.

. . . And she is not pretty, at all--she is anything _but_ pretty, though she is so good and dear--yet she will never marry unless she has a large dower. And there is nothing in her life if she does not marry.

And there is no money for a large dower, but only for a little bit for her and a little bit for me. So they sent me on this visit to America, for here the men do not ask dowers and what was saved on me would help Julietta--and now----"

Borne headlong on her flood of revelation Maria Angelina could not stop to watch the change in Barry Elder's face. And she was utterly unprepared for the immense vehemence of the exclamation which cut into her consciousness with such startling effect that she stopped and gasped and swallowed uncertainly before finis.h.i.+ng in an altered key, "And so I must marry in America--for Julietta's dower----"

In an odd voice Barry offered, "You think it your duty--because Byrd is so rich----?"

"I know it is my duty," she gave back, goaded to desperation, "but--but, oh, it is like that cake of yours, Signor--of a nothingness to me within!"

Very abruptly Barry turned from her; he drove his hands deep into his pocket and strode across the room and back. He brought up directly in front of her.

"Maria Angelina," he said softly, "how old are you?"

"Eighteen."

"How many men have you known?"

"You, first, Signor, then the others here."

"But you did care for him," he said. "You kissed him."

Her eyes dropped, her cheeks flamed and he saw her lips quiver--those soft, sensitive lips of hers which seemed to breathe such tender warmth and perfume like the warmth and perfume of a flower. But through the s.h.i.+ne of tears her eyes came back to his.

"No, Signor, it was he who kissed me--and without my consent! I did not kiss him--never, never, never!"

"Is there such a difference?"

"But there is all the difference----"

"Maria Angelina, you are sure that to kiss a man yourself, to kiss him deliberately, unmistakably upon the lips, is a final seal and ultimate surrender, and that if you do not marry a man you have so kissed you would be no better than a worthless deceiver, an outrageous flirt, an abandoned trifler----"

She looked at him amazedly.

His eyes were oddly dancing, his lips were curved in a boyish smile, infinitely merry, infinitely tender; the wind was blowing back the curly locks of hair from his face, giving it the look of a victorious runner, arrived at some swift goal.

Back of him, through the open door of the cabin, the green and gold of the forest shone in translucent brightness.

"But yes--that is true----" she stammered, not daring to trust that rush of happiness, that sweet and secret singing of her blood.

"Then, Maria Angelina," said he gayly yet adoringly, "Maria Angelina, you little darling of the G.o.ds, come here instantly and kiss me. . . .

For I am never going to let you go again."

THE END