Flaming Youth

CHAPTER XVII

Insistent jangling of the telephone woke Scott next morning at the club. He was prepared for the rough sweetness of Pat's voice in his ear.

"Is that you, Mr. Scott? Aren't you up yet? Lazy!"

"Good-morning, little Pat. What time is it?"

"I did wake you up, then. It's terribly early—for me. Only nine. Aren't you surprised to hear me?"

"Not a bit."

"Oh! You expected me to call up. Boasting, aren't you? I didn't intend to call you."

"But I intended to call you. What changed your mind?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said evasively. "I woke up early myself, and I suppose I felt lonely. When are you coming out?"

"Just as soon as I can get there."

Her soft, elfin chuckle was the reception which this announcement got. "Quick, then! I want awfully to see you now. And I might change my mind later."

Throughout the hurried processes of dressing while he breakfasted, Scott strove to quiet and command his thoughts, to find some clue to this tangle of passion wherein he had become ensnared. Incredible that he should so have lost himself, after the warning of the earlier experience. She, too, had been carried beyond her depth by a feeling presumably uninterpretable to her inexperience; so he believed. True, she had been through sentimental encounters before, by her own admission, but he too fatuously assumed that these were of minor and[Pg 183] transient import, that it had remained to him to awaken her. "Boasting," Pat would have said.

She was awaiting him in the music room. "I thought you were never coming," she sighed. "But the others aren't up yet." She half lifted her arms, expectant, enticing.

"Wait," said he.

She gave him a quick glance, puzzled, apprehensive, a little angry. "You're going to scold me. It was all your fault."

"Absolutely. If there is anyone to be scolded it's I."

"It wasn't," she declared with one of her vehement and point-blank reversals. "I did it." Her face took on its most impish expression. "Bad bunny! I don't care."

"I care," he said evenly. "More than I could have believed it possible to care. I love you, Pat."

"Oh, no!" she protested. "I didn't want you to say that."

"What did you expect?" he demanded, taken aback. "Did you want this to be just a cheap and easy little flirtation—a flutter, as you call it?"

"No-o. I didn't want it to be that. I wanted you to—to like me. But why did you have to say that?"

"As a justification. No, not quite that; nothing can justify me. But as an excuse, not for myself, but for you."

"For me? I don't understand."

"Think, Pat." His voice was very gentle.

Her dark, delicate brows drew down in concentration. "Yes; I think I do see. You mean you would not have kissed me that way without—without thinking a lot of me."

"I mean that I should not be here now if I were not deeply and wholly in love with you."

[Pg 184]
"And you're telling me to keep me from feeling ashamed of myself."

"Yes. There is nothing shameful in my feeling for you, inexcusable as it is."

"I think," she pronounced slowly, "you're the most divine man I've ever met."

"Oh, no," he refuted bitterly. "Just a weakling. But I give you my word, dear love, if I could have foreseen this I would have gone to the farthest corner of the earth rather than have it come about."