going to penalize you to that extent. If you
must have a cheek to press, go kiss----" She paused, while the
conviction darted into his mind that she had remembered that Johnson
girl blunder after all, then said: "Mr. Burkhardt's cheek."

Again relief swept him.

"Come, be kind, Janet," he began. But she was already through the gate
and skipping up the walk, vanishing in the gloom of the veranda. The
screen door clapped shut. "Peeved, all right. I'll have to be
extra-nice to her for a day or so until she calms down," he murmured
to himself. "Must send her a box of chocolates and some magazines
to-morrow to show my contrite heart; that always gets 'em. Hang it,
it's time to fix a day, too. We've been engaged long enough. She sure
has a figure and face--a beaut! I guess she didn't smell the booze on
my breath. Got to be careful about that till we're married." He jumped
into his car.

The screen door had clapped shut, but Janet had not entered. She had
employed the artifice to convey the impression it had. She did not
wish to go in to her work just yet, for calm as she had appeared
during the interview her emotions were running full tide. Love Ed
Sorenson? Marry him? She groped for and dropped into a wicker chair,
her head sinking in shame and self-abasement. Never--never!

And before her mind swam another face, a face with the hair ruffled
about the brow, clear of eyes and strong-lined, as she had beheld it
in the moonlight of the road.

All at once she tugged at a finger, fiercely pulling off the
engagement ring. She rubbed her cheek as well, with an angry hand, for
the memory of kisses was burning her as by fire.

Then she sat quite motionless for a long time.

"I'll just ask father," she exclaimed. "There can't be more than a
dozen Johnsons around here."

Which would have given Ed Sorenson a fresh jolt in his breathing
apparatus if he had overheard, and shriveled the cocky self-assurance
with which he sipped a high-ball that moment at Vorse's bar.

CHAPTER XI

JANET AND MARY

In a region as sparsely settled by white people as San Mateo and its
adjoining counties there were not, as Janet put it, more than a dozen
Johnson families. In fact, there were but two, she learned from her
father: one at Bowenville, the small railroad town of three hundred
people, a merchant with a wife and four little children; the other a
rancher on Terry Creek, whose wife was dead and who had one child, a
girl of sixteen