he began, with apparent irrelevance, "what you been doing,
anyway?"

"Me!" cried Hanson. "You know. Been falling in love with you as hard as
I could, and"--his voice ringing with a passionate sincerity--"that's
God's truth, Pearl."

She looked up at him, her wild eyes melting, her delicately cut lips
upcurling in a smile; then her head drooped, her whole body expressed a
soft yielding.

Hanson grew white, almost he stretched out his arms as if to clasp her,
when she threw up her head with a low laugh, a tinkle of mockery
through it, like the jangled strings of her guitar.

"But I mean it," she insisted, and now he saw that she had something
really on her mind, something she had determined to say to him. "Listen
to me," imperiously, "and stop looking at me as if you were looking
through me and still didn't see me."

"I'm seeing your eyes, Pearl," he muttered, "and they drown me. And I'm
seeing your lips and they draw me like a magnet does a needle; but if
they drew me through hell, I'd go."

"Listen," she spoke more imperiously than before. "Have you noticed how
Pop's been watching you--looking slantwise out of the corners of his
eyes whenever you come around."

"I sure have," replied Hanson, "being as I'm not blind. But what of it?
I supposed he treated every one that came around you like that."

"No," she shook her head thoughtfully. "I been studying over it, but I
can't quite make it out. Pop don't pay much attention to men that ain't
his kind, and you're not. And Bob Flick is always jealous, of course,
but he doesn't usually take it out watching folks like a ferret does a
rat hole. No, it isn't that."

"Well, what do you put it down to?" Rudolf tried to speak easily.

Pearl paid no particular heed to this question. "And it's not all
Hughie," she mused. "Of course," and here he saw an expression of real
regret, almost worry, on her face, "of course it's bad for all of us
when Hughie takes a dislike to any one."

Hanson's sense of injury was inflamed. "But why the devil," he cried,
"should Hughie's unreasoning cranks count with commonsense people? I
can't understand," with wondering impatience, "why you all act like you
do about that boy!"

"We've all learned that Hughie knows things that we don't know."

"Umph!" the exclamation was disgustedly incredulous. "And so, simply
because Hughie chooses to take a dislike to me, I'm to be watched like a
criminal and treated, even by you, with suspicion."

"No,