ose.

"O God, but you're lovely!" he said in a half-smothered and shamefaced
sort of whisper.

"_Verboten!_" I reminded him. "And not so much the cussing, Peter, as
the useless compliments."

He said nothing to that, but once more sat staring out over the
twilight prairie for quite a long time. When he spoke again it was in
a quieter and much more serious tone.

"I suppose I may as well tell you," he said without looking at me,
"that I've come into a pretty clear understanding of the situation
here at Alabama Ranch."

"It's kind of a mix-up, isn't it?" I suggested, with an attempt at
lightness.

Peter nodded his head.

"I've been wondering how long you're going to wait," he observed,
apparently as much to himself as to me.

"Wait for what?" I inquired.

"For what you call your mix-up to untangle," was his answer.

"There's nothing for me to do but to wait," I reminded him.

He shook his head in dissent.

"You can't waste your life, you know, doing that," he quietly
protested.

"What else can I do?" I asked, disturbed a little by the absence of
color from his face, apparent even in that uncertain light.

"Nothing's suggested itself, I suppose?" he ventured, after a silence.

"Nothing that prompts me into any immediate action," I told him. "You
see, Peter, I'm rather anchored by three little hostages down in that
little shack there!"

That left him silent for another long and brooding minute or two.

"I suppose you've wondered," he finally said, "why I've stuck around
here as long as I have?"

I nodded, not caring to trust myself to words, and then, realizing I
was doing the wrong thing, I shook my head.

"It's because, from the morning you found me in that mud-hole, I've
just wanted to be near you, to hear your voice when you spoke, to see
the curve of your lips and the light come and go in your eyes when you
laugh," were the words that came ever so slowly from Peter. "I've
wanted that so much that I've let about everything else in life go
hang. Yet in a way, and in my own world, I'm a man of some little
importance. I've been cursed with enough money, of course, to move
about as I wish, and loaf as I like. But that sort of life isn't
really living. I'm not in the habit, though, of wanting the things I
can't have. So what strikes me as the tragic part of it all is that I
couldn't have met and known you when you were as free as I am now. In
a way, you _are_ free, or you ought to be. You're a woman