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She sprang up, shaking the tears from her eyes. "I'll go," she said. She startled Harboro by that note of despair in her voice. "When does he wish me to come?" "He says he is ill and alone. I think he would be glad if I could persuade you to go this evening. Why not this evening?" Unfortunately, Harboro concealed a part of the truth in this.
He was seemingly quite as much at ease in the presence of a Chicago poetess with a practised a somewhat too practised laugh or a fellow employee risen, like himself, to a point where society could see him. Harboro was included among those invited, and he put on correct evening dress, and rode over in a coach, and became a favorite in Eagle Pass.
He was glad afterward that Sylvia was engaged with Antonia in the dining-room, and did not have a chance to observe him as he examined the thing which that envelope contained. It was a statement from one of the stables of the town, and it set forth the fact that Harboro was indebted to the stable for horse-hire.
She hadn't known anything about its having been transferred from one house to the other. "Who brought it?" she asked, startled. "I sent for it," explained Harboro. "I knew you'd want it the first thing." "You didn't go to the house?" "Oh, no. I sent the expressman to the house and instructed him to ask for your things. I suppose he met your father. It's all right." She looked at him curiously.
He looked at Harboro ponderingly, as a child may look at an unreasoning parent. And then he became alert again as Harboro threw at him contemptuously: "Go on; get out!" Sylvia did not look at Runyon as he picked up his coat and hat and vanished. She did not realize that he had achieved a perfect middle ground between an undignified escape and a too deliberate going.
It fell when the door opened quietly and Harboro came into the room. He closed the door behind him and regarded them strangely as if his face had died, but as if his eyes retained the power of seeing. Sylvia drew away from Runyon, not spasmodically, but as if she were moving in her sleep. She left one hand on Runyon's sleeve. She was regarding Harboro with an expression of hopeless bewilderment.
She merely gave to her father the money which Harboro gave her, and which she was expected to use without explaining how it was spent. With the passing of days she ceased to worry about those messages of her father she ceased to regard them as reminders that the tie between her old life and the new was not entirely broken.
"There," he said, instantly tender again, "you'll feel better soon. I won't be impatient with you." But Sylvia's tears were only incidental to some lesser fear or grief. They did not spring from the wrong she had suffered, or from the depths of her nature, which had been dwarfed and darkened. She listlessly pulled a chair into a better position and sat down where she need not look at Harboro.
"I believe you send a horse around for Mrs. Harboro occasionally?" "Oh, yes; every week or so, or oftener." Harboro walked to the boy's side and drew his wallet from his pocket deliberately. "I wish," he said, "that the next time Mrs. Harboro needs a horse you'd send this fine animal to her. I have an idea it would please her. Will you remember?"
She had not danced to her heart's content, but she had become weary, and she threw Antonia's rebozo over her shoulders and leaned back in her seat. For the moment Harboro and Valdez and Wayne were grouped near her, standing. The girl Wayne was to marry the next day had made her formal appearance now and was the centre of attention.
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