I won't stay! not a moment!"
"But we've ordered--"
"You stay and eat, then. I won't stop here another minute!"
She rose. She smothered the Marquess's protests about the
awkwardness, the ludicrousness of such a flight.
"What will the waiter think?" he asked, being afraid of a waiter,
though of no one else.
Kedzie did not care what the waiter thought, so long as he did not
know whom he thought it of. Strathdene gave the headwaiter a bill
and followed Kedzie out. He was hungry, angry, and puzzled.
Skip Magruder never knew what a chaperon he had been. If Providence
managed the affair it chose an odd instrument, and intervened, as
usual, at the last moment. Providence would save itself a good deal
of work if it came round a little earlier in these cases. Perhaps it
does and finds nobody awake.
Strathdene demanded explanations. Kedzie told him truth but not
all of it.
"It suddenly swept over me," she gasped, "how horrible it was
for me to be there."
She wept with shame and when he would have consoled her she kept him
aloof. The astonishing result of the outing was that both came home
better. It suddenly swept over Strathdene that Kedzie was innocenter
than he had dreamed. She was good! By gad! she was good enough to be
the wife even of a Strathdene. He told Kedzie that he wished to God
he could marry her. She answered fervently that she wished to God he
could.
He asked her "You don't really love that Dyckman fella, do you?"
"I don't really love anybody but you," said Kedzie.
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