"Say," she 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."