An American Politician Part 25

"You need not offer me Miss Brandon as an inducement to stay with you, Joe, if you really want me. Twenty Miss Brandons would not make any difference!"

"Really?" said Joe smiling. "You are a dear good boy, Ronald, when you are nice," she added presently. "Sit down again."

Ronald went back to his seat beside her, and they were both silent for a while. Joe repented a little, for she thought she had been teasing him, and she reflected that she ought to be doing her best to make him happy.

"Joe--do not you think it would be very pleasant to be always like this?"

said Ronald after a time.

"How--like this?"

"Together," said Ronald softly, and a gentle look came into his handsome face, as he looked up at his cousin. "Together--only in our own home."

Joe did not answer, but the color came to her cheeks, and she looked annoyed. She had hoped that the matter was settled forever, for it seemed so easy for her. Ronald misinterpreted the blush. For the moment the old conviction came back to him that she was to be his wife, and if it was not exactly love that he felt, it was a satisfaction almost great enough to take its place.

"Would it not?" said he presently.

"Please do not talk about it, Ronald. What is the use? I have said all there is to say, I am sure."

"But I have not," he answered, insisting. "Please, Joe dearest, think about it seriously. Think what a cruel thing it is you are doing." His voice was very tender, but he was perfectly calm; there was not the slightest vibration of pa.s.sion in the tones. Joe did not wholly understand; she only knew that he was not satisfied with the first explanation she had given him, and that she felt sorry for him, but was incapable of changing her decision.

"Must I go over it all again?" she asked piteously. "Did I not make it clear to you, Ronald? Oh--don't talk about it!"

"You have no heart, Joe," said Ronald hotly. "You don't know what you make me suffer. You don't know that this sort of thing is enough to wreck a man's existence altogether. You don't know what you are doing, because you have no heart--not the least bit of one."

"Do not say that--please do not," Joe entreated, looking at him with imploring eyes, for his words hurt her. Then suddenly the tears came in a quick hot gush, and she hid her face in her hands. "Oh, Ronald, Ronald--it is you who do not know," she sobbed.

Ronald did not quite know what to do; he never did when Joe cried, but fortunately that disaster had not occurred often since he was very small.

He was angry with himself for having disturbed and hurt her, but he did not know what to do, most probably because he did not really love her.

"Joe," he said, looking at her in some embarra.s.sment, "don't!" Then he rose and rather timidly laid a hand on her shoulder. But she shrank from him with a petulant motion, and the tears trickled through her small white hands and fell upon her dark dress and on the "Life of Rufus Choate."

"Joe, dear"--Ronald began again. And then, in great uncertainty of mind, he went and looked out of the window. Presently he came back and stood before her once more.

"I am awfully sorry I said it, Joe. Please forgive me. You don't often cry, you know, and so"--He hesitated.

Joe looked up at him with a smile through her tears, beautiful as a rose just wet with a summer shower.

"And so--you did not think I could," she said. She dried her eyes quickly and rose to her feet. "It is very silly of me, I know, but I cannot help it in the least," said she, turning from him in pretense of arranging the knickknacks on the mantel.

"Of course you cannot help it, Joe, dear; as if you had not a perfect right to cry, if you like! I am such a brute--I know."

"Come and look at the snow," said Joe, taking his hand and leading him to the window. Enormous Irishmen in pilot coats, comforters, and india-rubber boots, armed with broad wooden spades, were struggling to keep the drifts from the pavement. Joe and Ronald stood and watched them idly, absorbed in their own thoughts.

Presently a b.o.o.by sleigh drawn by a pair of strong black horses floundered up the hill and stopped at the door.

"Oh, Ronald, there is Sybil, and she will see I have been crying. You must amuse her, and I will come back in a few minutes." She turned and fled, leaving Ronald at the window.

A footman sprang to the ground, and nearly lost his footing in the snow as he opened a large umbrella and rang the bell. In a moment Sybil was out of the sleigh and at the door of the house; she could not sit still till it was opened, although the flakes were falling as thickly as ever.

"Oh"--she exclaimed, as she entered the room and was met by Ronald, "I thought Joe was here." There was color in her face, and she took Ronald's hand cordially. He blushed to the eyes, and stammered.

"Miss Thorn is--she--indeed, she will be back in a moment. How do you do?

Dreadful weather, is not it?"

"Oh, it is only a snowstorm," said Sybil, brus.h.i.+ng a few flakes from her furs as she came near the fire. "We do not mind it at all here. But of course you never have snow in England."

"Not like this, certainly," said Ronald. "Let me help you," he added, as Sybil began to remove her cloak.

It was a very sudden change of company for Ronald; five minutes ago he was trying, very clumsily and hopelessly, to console Joe Thorn in her tears, feeling angry enough with himself all the while for having caused them.

Now he was face to face with Sybil Brandon, the most beautiful woman he remembered to have seen, and she smiled at him as he took her heavy cloak from her shoulders, and the touch of the fur sent a thrill to his heart, and the blood to his cheeks.

"I must say," he remarked, depositing the things on a sofa, "you are very courageous to come out, even though you are used to it."

"You have come yourself," said Sybil, laughing a little. "You told me last night that you did not come here every day."

"Oh--I told my cousin I had come because I was so lonely at the hotel. It is amazingly dull to sit all day in a close room, reading stupid novels."

"I should think it would be. Have you nothing else to do?"

"Nothing in the wide world," said Ronald with a smile. "What should I do here, in a strange place, where I know so few people?"

"I suppose there is not much for a man to do, unless he is in business.

Every one here is in some kind of business, you know, so they are never bored."

Ronald wished he could say the right thing to reestablish the half-intimacy he had felt when talking to Sybil the night before. But it was not easy to get back to the same point. There was an interval of hours between yesterday and to-day--and there was Joe.

"I read novels to pa.s.s the time," he said, "and because they are sometimes so like one's own life. But when they are not, they bore me."

Sybil was fond of reading, and she was especially fond of fiction, not because she cared for sensational interests, but because she was naturally contemplative, and it interested her to read about the human nature of the present, rather than to learn what any individual historian thought of the human nature of the past.

"What kind of novels do you like best?" she asked, sitting down to pa.s.s the time with Ronald until Josephine should make her appearance.

"I like love stories best," said Ronald.

"Oh, of course," said Sybil gravely, "so do I. But what kind do you like best? The sad ones, or those that end well?"

"I like them to end well," said Ronald, "because the best ones never do, you know."

"Never?" There was something in Sybil's tone that made Ronald look quickly at her. She said the word as though she, too, had something to regret.

"Not in my experience," answered Surbiton, with the decision of a man past loving or being loved.

"How dreadfully gloomy! One would think you had done with life, Mr.

Surbiton," said Sybil, laughing.

"Sometimes I think so, Miss Brandon," answered Ronald in solemn tones.

"I suppose we all think it would be nice to die, sometimes. But then the next morning things look so much brighter."