Part 56

There was a murmured reply in the softer tones.

"No money?" the American echoed. "I suppose I could guess that." There came the crisp sound of parting paper. "Now, if you will make a figure for the total, Father, I'll give you this check to pay for the whole thing. I've lived in this town five months, and I like the people--it's my treat. No, I haven't counted the chickens and measured the houses, but I can see the amount isn't exactly ruinous. Now, we won't talk any more about it; here you are."

"Señor Rose," solemnly said the old man, with inexpressible dignity and authority,--Flavia heard him rise,--"this will be repaid by the One to Whom you lend through the poor--repaid to you, and to your daughter."

There was a moment's pause.

"You might include my son in that; I've got one, you know," suggested Thomas Rose, carefully casual.

Flavia covered her eyes, and the tears trickled through her slender fingers.

When the moon was up and the pant of a distant motor announced that the guest was being conveyed to the village by Lenoir and the big automobile, Flavia went in to her father. Both of them maintained their usual composure, as they smiled at one another across the room, but the young girl's extreme pallor was not to be disguised when she came into the light. Mr. Rose looked at her, and continued to look.

"You're not well, my girl," he asserted, concerned. "Never mind drawing that curtain; come over here. Don't you think it's time to tell me why you sent off Gerard? I know how hard it must have hit him, when he was down already, and I've felt sorry often enough, but a man has to take a woman's answer and I've said nothing. But I believed at home that you liked him, and I believe you have been fretting ever since."

Flavia grasped the heavy curtain, gazing at him in an utter confusion of thought that amounted to actual giddiness.

"I--I sent away Mr. Gerard?" she marvelled.

"Who else? Or if you accepted him, why was I not told?"

"Will you tell me what you mean?" she asked brokenly.

"Mean? I mean that the last time I saw Allan Gerard alone, on the day I met you and Corrie driving home together, he asked my permission to propose to you. I rather guess that hour with him didn't make me very easy on Corrie, although I was given no cause to be otherwise by Gerard. Gerard said frankly that he wouldn't have offered you such a wreck as he felt himself, much as he loved you, if he had not gone so far before he was hurt that he had no right to leave in silence. He said that as a matter of honorable justice he must lay the decision before you and abide by your will. Very quiet, he was--I told him that I would rather give you to him than to any other man on earth, and I meant it."

The room blurred before Flavia's dilated eyes.

"You never told me! Papa, you never told me!"

The passionate cry of grief brought Mr. Rose to his feet.

"Told you? Gerard was to tell you. I wanted to carry him home with me that afternoon, but he refused. In fact, he was not fit, nor I either, to stand any more sentiment just then. He said he would write and ask you to see him, if you cared to have him speak or come back at all. That trip West he had to take. Didn't he write?"

She saw the softly-lighted little room at home where Jack Rupert had come to her, and Isabel's suffused, desperate face as she snatched the letter from its owner. And as a pendant picture she saw the bleak, solitary railway station in the gray December morning, where Gerard, ill and reft of his splendid strength, had waited alone for the girl who did not come.

Mr. Rose reached her as she swayed forward.

"Take me home," she gasped, clinging to him with small fierce hands. "I never knew. Dear, take me home."

The next morning they left Val de Rosas.

It is a long journey from Andalusia to New York. But it was on the morning they boarded the ocean liner that Mr. Rose purchased a New York journal--and met a news item that gave him material for thought during the rest of the trip. The item was on the sporting page, and stated that the Cup race course was now open for practice; among the first of the cars to commence training being the Mercury Titan, driven by Corrie Rose--one of the cleverest young professionals in America, whose work with the Mercury Company's special racing machine had given the greatest satisfaction to its owner and designer, Mr. Allan Gerard.

There was no longer any cause for concealment. When Mr. Rose carried the journal to Flavia, she told him quite simply to whom Corrie had gone in his exile and what she knew of his life with Gerard. Of his racing she herself had been left ignorant; she could guess whose forgiving tenderness had spared her that anxiety.

"You are not angry with Corrie," she ventured, before her father's knit brow and squared jaw. "You did not forbid him to race or he would not have done so, I am sure."

"No, I did not. I didn't think I had to," was the dry response. "Angry? He and I are past that. The days are gone when we used to have our differences and shake hands on them. We'll get along together quietly enough, I dare say."

"Now, I would rather you said you were angry," she grieved.

Thomas Rose thrust his hands into his pockets, looking down at the newspaper page. He had altered during the last year in a way difficult to characterize. It was not that he looked older or more hard, there was no bitterness in the strong face, but he looked like a man who stood in the shadow instead of in the sun.

"So would Corrie, I fancy," he said heavily.