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Let go, I tell you!" said Barney, struggling in his brother's embrace; "stop it, now!" With a mighty effort he threw Dick off from him and stood on guard with an embarrassed, half-shamed, half-indignant laugh. The crowd gathered near in delighted expectation. There was always something sure to happen when Dick "got after" his older brother.
But there was a certain half-shamed, half-defiant suggestion in his expression, yet coupled with a watchful lurking uneasiness which was not pleasant and hardly becoming in a bridegroom and the possessor of such a bride. But the frank, joyous, innocent face of Polly Mullins, resplendent with a simple, happy confidence, melted our hearts again, and condoned the fellow's shortcomings.
Only when the last good-bye was said did she soften into tenderness, actually allowing herself to be kissed without protest, and saying hurriedly in a low, half-shamed voice: "Good-bye, Fuzzy. Bless you! Never say die. Sometimes, you know, it takes a big thing to open one's eyes. Keep straight ahead from where you are now, and you'll have no more tumbles."
"I don't feel that I ought to detain you," she said, breaking the silence which he for his part would have been willing to continue, "but" she looked up at him with a half-shamed smile "I have n't the courage to refuse your kindness." "You have the right to accept it merely as a woman," he assured her. "But I should n't need help," she answered with some spirit.
"You killed it in the nick of time," he said, in a voice that still spoke of the ground, but with a note of half-shamed gratitude. "I want to thank you," he added. "You were brave. It would have turned on you if you had missed. I know them. I've killed five." He spoke very slowly, huskily. "Well, you are safe that is the chief thing," she rejoined, making as though to depart.
She was as sweet as before, but there was a soft shyness over her, a half-shamed, half-frank consciousness in her face, a glad light in her eyes that made her all new to me. Her perfect trust in Craig was touching to see. 'He will tell me what to do, she would say, till I began to realise how impossible it would be for him to betray such trust, and be anything but true to the best.
It was also certain that she meant to carry it through with rigid self-control. Meeting her two brothers at lunch, she received the half-shamed congratulations of one and the sarcastic comments of the other without the smallest hint of discomfiture.
But this I know: I spoke so fiercely that she cowered before me as she had cowered before my uncle Sepa when he rated her because of her Grecian garb. And as she wept then, so she wept now, only more passionately and with great sobs. At length I ceased, half-shamed but still angry and smarting sorely. For even while she wept she could find a tongue to answer with and a woman's shafts are sharp.
"I imagined I cared a very long time ago," she said, with an effort. "What! Before that trial business?" he said. "I wish to Heaven I'd known!" "Why?" she said. "Because if I'd known I wouldn't have been such a fool," he said with abrupt vehemence. "I would never have run that infernal risk." "What risk?" she said. He laughed, a half-shamed laugh. "Oh, I didn't quite mean to let that out.
And she despised those who did not do as she did, those who rested, and were able to enjoy life a little in the intervals of work. She would go and rouse Louisa in her room when from time to time she sat down in the middle of her work to dream. Louisa would sigh, but she submitted to it with a half-shamed smile.
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