He raised his eyes then, not to look at her, but because of something he did not himself understand. Perhaps it just happened so? She regarded him again; looked him full in the eyes, and his eyes spoke more than words. Strangely she understood all, almost in a flash, and was sorry. She regretted that she had spoken so directly. She admired him now. When he had looked up, and like that, she had seemed to see and understand at last the man he was.

"Pardon me, please," she said, and rising quickly, took a chair nearer his. She reached and touched him on the arm. "I didn't—I—well, I didn't intend to be bold." She paused in confusion, and then went on:

"I hope you will pardon me. I am sure I didn't intend to embarrass you."

"It is all right," he said. "And since you have asked me, may I explain?"

It was she who was now embarrassed. She looked away in great confusion. She was bolder than the conventional girl as a rule; but the subject was delicate. Yet she wanted to hear the story that she knew he would never tell. If he did, he was not the type of man she had estimated.

"Of course you would think me a cad, a—well, I have my opinion of a man that would tell his side of such a story to a woman."

She looked at him then without any embarrassment in her eyes. She was able to read the man and all that was him clearly. She smiled a smile after this that was one of satisfaction, and at that moment her sisters called that the meal was ready.

CHAPTER V

Table of Contents

"TELL ME WHY YOU DIDN'T ANSWER THE LAST LETTER I WROTE YOU"

"NOW I wish you would tell me all about yourself, that is, all you care to tell," said Irene Grey to the man who sat beside her on the veranda of their beautiful home, some time after luncheon had been served. "I have always been peculiarly interested in you and your life alone off there in the Northwest," whereupon she made herself comfortable and prepared to listen.

"Oh," he said hesitatingly, thinking of the series of dry years and their attendant disaster, and hoping that he could find some way of avoiding a conversation in which that was involved. "I really don't consider there is much to relate. My life has been rather—well, in a measure uneventful."

"Oh, but it hasn't, I know," she protested. "All alone you were for so many years, and you have been, so I have been told, an untiring worker." She was anxious, he could see, but withal sincere, and in the course of the afternoon, she told him of how her father had came to Kansas a poor man, bought the land now a part of what they owned on payments, found that raising potatoes was profitable—especially when they were ready for the early market, and later after his marriage to her mother, and with her mother's assistance, had succeeded. From where they sat, their property stretched before them in the valley of the Kaw, and comprised several hundred acres of the richest soil in the state. Indeed, his success was widely known, and Jean Baptiste had been rather curious to know the family intimately.