The captain looked at her, astonished. Under cover of removing the cups and saucers to the kitchen, he spoke low to his consort. “Go to bed?” he asked. “Where’s your politeness, Betsy?”
“Where’s your common sense, Hiram Salter! You think Irving Bruce has ploughed down here to talk boats with you?”
Hiram scratched his head, and his eyes widened. “Why, I said that very thing to you the other night,” he protested, “and you said – ”
“Never mind what I said! Just get upstairs as quick as you can.”
“Come with me, Mr. Irving,” said Betsy, returning to the living-room. “Here’s a little closet where you can’t much more’n turn around, but I guess you’ll sleep well. It’s a feather-bed.”
They stood alone in the chamber, and he closed the door and took her by the shoulders in the old familiar way.
“You remember our talk one night in the garden?” he asked.
“Yes, as if it was yesterday,” she answered.
“Do you apologize?”
“No,” she laughed.
“I think you poisoned the mind of the party of the second part. Confess if you did. I mean it; for if you didn’t, I’ve broken three engagements, and traveled all day for nothing.”
“Yes – I —did!” returned Betsy boldly.
“Do you apologize?”
“Not a bit of it.”
They looked at each other in the dusk. “Well, are you glad I came?”
“If you hadn’t, Mr. Irving,” replied Betsy slowly, “I don’t know but I’d ’a’ given back the silver!”
Irving pressed her hands and laughed.
In a little while the Salters said good-night to their guests. “You can see, Irvin’, whether I’m hen-pecked,” said the captain meekly, as he mounted the stairs.
“You’re an awful warning,” replied Irving.
“Would it do any harm,” asked Hiram in a stage-whisper when they reached their room, “if I should yell down to ’em to look out the window and see the weddin’-cake?”
Betsy locked the door.
Rosalie was sitting passive on her stool by the fire. A rich color mantled in her cheeks, but eyes and lips were grave. She was regaining self-possession. Perhaps Irving had indeed come on account of the boat.
He seated himself in the chair Betsy had vacated, and watched the firelight play on Rosalie’s hair.
“How do you suppose it looks in the canyon to-night?” he asked, after a silence.
She shook her head. “I’m glad we can’t see.”
“And I,” he agreed. “I have it here.” He touched his breast.
“Tell me about Nixie, and Helen,” said Rosalie with sudden brightness.
“Time enough for that next year,” returned Irving. He laid his watch on his knee; and for a minute they both watched the tiny second-hand, inexorably hurrying.
“How quiet it is!” he said. “What a place for the year to die. I have a kindness for this old year, Rosalie. I should dread to see it go if I didn’t have such hopes for the new.”
“Yes, your business prospects are brilliant, Mr. Derwent told me once.”
“Betsy Foster,” said Irving slowly, “‘Clever Betsy,’ that deep, dark, deceitful, and designing woman who is upstairs now, wide-awake, wondering what I am saying to you, talked to you once about me, and told you to remember that men were deceivers ever. She warned you against me. She’s given me an up-hill pull all summer.”
Rosalie’s heart fluttered wildly.
“I wasn’t sure until I had been back in Boston for weeks that I loved you; but I suspected it. I know that I have nothing more than a fair chance, if I have that; but I’m sure now, Rosalie, that you are the one woman in the world for me. You’re the combination of everything I ever admired in any girl. If there is no one that has a better right, give me the chance to win you. I’ve come here to ask you that.”
She sat so immovable that Irving stooped forward. The face she lifted had the darkening eyes, the trembling lips, that Betsy had seen.
“When you caught me from the cliff,” she said, “I felt your heart beat. The sunrise in the canyon was the sunrise of my life. Every pulse of my heart since that morning has beaten with the pulse of yours.”
He looked at her, wonder, incredulity, joy, holding him motionless for a space; then in the still, snow-bound cottage, golden with firelight, Rosalie’s lover took her in his arms. “My dove!” he murmured.