THE FIGHTING SHEPHERDESS
should ask her to marry him, and none at all why he should not, yet somehow when he opened his lips to ask, "Will you let me?" the words choked him. He said, instead, with the utmost cordiality:
"Don't you dare do anything so unfriendly as to leave without saying good-bye to me. Will you promise to wait until I return?"
If she had obeyed her impulse she would have shrieked at him:
"No! no! no! Not a minute, if you go to see that woman!" She would have liked to make him choose between them, but she dared not put him to the test for fear that she would place herself in a position from which her pride would not allow her to recede.
Both wept in chagrin and rage while Disston rode away buoyantly, marvelling at his own light-heartedness, tingling with the old time eagerness which used to come to him the moment he was in the saddle with his horse's head turned toward Bitter Creek.
He had stubbornly fought his desire to visit Kate again. What was the use, he demanded of himself sternly. She did not want to see him and virtually had said so. She had changed radically; she cared only for her sheep—even Teeters admitted that much. Anything beyond a warm friendship between them was, of course, impossible. She was not of his world, she did not "belong," and had no desire to. She could no more preside at a dinner table or pour tea gracefully, as would be expected of his wife, than Beth could shear a sheep or ear-mark one.
These things and many others he had told himself a thousand times to stop the longing he had to saddle his horse and go to her. What a weakling he was, he thought contemptuously, that he could not put her out of his mind and do the obviously right and proper thing by asking
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