MRS. RADER HAS A WORD TO SAY
ing young." Her voice dropped as she added below her breath. "That is just the trouble."
Carron stared at this cryptic sentence.
"You are a stranger, and you are a man who has come from out in the world," she continued, looking at him squarely. "Not many such come up here; and as soon as I saw you I felt sure, I knew—" she swallowed abruptly what she had been on the point of speaking. She left an ellipsis to be filled by imagination, by conjecture. "I was just as sure then as I am now. There is no mistaking a thing of that sort. But how could I come to you then—a stranger—and speak of it? I don't see how I can do it now! But you were so kind about helping us day before yesterday, and doing everything that was hard, I saw—at least I thought that, if I asked you, you might not take advantage of it, at least for her sake! That, if I asked you, you might go."
Carron stood amazed, puzzled, floored by these halting, breathless sentences, and the confused suggestions they conveyed to him. He had to reach, to search, to put the thing together to make anything at all; and then he smiled at the sublime egoism of women that supposes each move a man makes to be drawn by the magnet woman. "My dear Mrs. Rader, I have not come here on your daughter's account. I had never seen her before, and I have no
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