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"You think my sword arm will not be strong enough?" he asked. "I shouldn't advise you to depend upon that. Time when I am able. Place we'll settle that afterward. We can't find seconds here too much Puritanism; they would interfere. But we can arrange it; we're honorable men," he sneered. "I may depend upon you?" "Yes." "If not beware! Now, surgeon, only one thing more," as Harwin left the tent.
Elizabeth drew back still more; some flash of feeling made the blood come hotly to her face for a moment, then fade away again. Katie looked up, turned her eyes slowly from one to another, finding everywhere the sympathy she sought. "Go, Stephen, since you will feel better," she said, "but it's of no use, I am sure. I understand now something Master Harwin said to me when he left me.
"Mother," she said, "I do sometimes feel badly for Master Harwin; he is the only man in all the world that I ever had anything like fear of, and now and then I did of him, such a fierceness would come over him once in a while, not to me, but about me, I know, about losing me. He was terribly in earnest.
Archdale and Waldo turned indignant glances on the speaker, but it was manifestly absurd to resent a speech that pleased the object of it, and that each secretly felt would not have sounded ill if he had made it himself. Elizabeth looked from Katie to Harwin with eyes that endorsed his assertion, and as the latter read her expression his scornful wonder in the boat returned.
Come here! come here!" he repeated excitedly. Harwin went up to him in silence, reading as he went a lesson that wrote itself on his mind as if in letters of blood.
"Ah! but you would be queen," said Harwin, "queen in your own right, a divine right of beauty that no one can resist." Katie looked at him, disposed for a moment to be angry, but her love of admiration could not resist the worship of his eyes, and the lips prepared to pout curved into a smile not less bewitching that the brightness of anger was still in her cheeks.
As the sun breaks out from a heavy cloud, the light returned to Harwin's blue eyes. "Yes," he said, "four years ago. I went to court with my uncle, Sir Rydal Harwin, and his majesty was gracious enough to nod in answer to my profound reverence." "It was a very brilliant scene, I am sure, and very interesting."
Stephen never gets into these moods, he is always kind and lovable, just as he has been to me as far back as I can remember, only, of course more so now." "But things have gone differently with him and with poor Master Harwin," answered Mrs. Archdale. "If you had said 'no' to Stephen, you would have seen the dark moods in him, too."
I often wonder what it is to be in this New World. It must be unlike the Old," she repeated. "I don't wonder," returned Katie, "and that's just what you shouldn't do. Wonder what you're going to wear to-morrow when we dine at Aunt Faith's, or whether Master Harwin will call this morning, or Master Waldo, or wonder about something sensible."
His money was still in the firm of John Archdale & Co., which it had made one of the richest in the Colonies; its withdrawal was now to be expected at any moment, for Harwin did not mean to return, and Archdale, while endeavoring to be ready for this, saw that it would cripple him. Harwin had been right in believing that he should make himself very useful and very acceptable to Katie's father.
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