The Claim Jumpers

It would not be difficult to expand these doubts, to amplify these

reasons, and even to adduce others which occurred to the unhappy young

man as he climbed the hill. But enough has been said. Surely the

reader, no matter how removed in sympathy from that line of argument,

must be able now at least to sympathize, to perceive that Bennington de

Laney had some reason for thought, some excuse for the tardiness of his

steps as they carried him to a meeting with the girl he loved.

For he did love her, perhaps the more tenderly that doubts must,

perforce, arise. All these considerations affected not at all his

thought of her. But now, for the first time, Bennington de Laney was

weighing the relative claims of duty and happiness. His happiness

depended upon his love. That his duty to his race, his parents, his

caste had some reality in fact, and a very solid reality in his own

estimation, the author hopes he has shown. If not, several pages have

been written in vain.

The conflict in his mind had carried him to the Rock. Here, as he

expected, he found Mary already arrived. He ascended to the little

plateau and dropped wearily to the moss. His face had gone very white

in the last quarter of an hour.

"You see now why I asked you to come to-day," she said without

preliminary. "Now you have seen them, and there is nothing more to

conceal."

"I know, I know," he replied dully. "I am trying to think it out. I

can't see it yet."

They took entirely for granted that each knew the subject of the

other's thoughts. The girl seemed much the more self-possessed of the

two.

"We may as well understand each other," she said quietly, without

emotion. "You have told me a certain thing, and have asked me for a

certain answer. I could not give it to you before without deceiving

you. Now the answer depends on you. I have deceived you in a way," she

went on more earnestly, "but I did not mean to. I did not realize the

difference, truly I didn't, until I saw the girl on the train. Then I

knew the difference between her and me, and between her's and mine. And

when you turned away, I saw that you were her kind, and I saw, too,

that you ought to know everything there was about me. Then you spoke."

"I meant what I said, too," he interrupted. "You must believe that,

Mary, whatever comes."

"I was sorry you did," she went on, as though she had not heard him.

Then with just a touch of impatience tingeing the even calm of her

voice, "Oh, why will men insist on saying those things!" she cried.

"The way to win a girl is not thus. He should see her often, without

speaking of love, being everything to her, until at last she finds she

can not live without him."