SON OF THE WIND
winter. "I want you to do me a very great favor," Carron said. "Probably you won't like it, but you will, won't you?"
"Yes." She was prompt. Had no hesitations.
"Tell your mother all about how the matter stands with us," he said. Then, as she fixed him with doubtful eyes, "You know—tell her that I've got to go back to the ranch at the end of this week, and you are going too. Aren't you?" he added, with a sudden edge of anxiety at finding her silent. Her breast rose in long breaths. Her head, inclined slightly forward, looked down upon the fires. "You knew that you were, didn't you?" he insisted, trying to get her averted eye.
"O, yes!" She turned to him and looked at him, as though once more she realized, with astonishment, how well she knew him. "But now that it has come, I—" She seemed to strain at a leash, aware perhaps for the first time how he had entrapped her fleet youth.
"It has come so soon," she murmured. "Can't we be like this a little longer? It's so lovely."
"But we can't. The end of the week, perhaps before, I've got to be off." He mused. "I suppose it will be rather a job, telling your mother. This is just what she has been afraid of."
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