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 or seventeen years of age. "I may be away at dinner time, so don't wait for me," she told her father next morning. "I'm going out in the country a few miles--and you know my car! If you'd just let me squeeze some of these patients who never pay, you could have a new car yourself." "Mine's all right," he smiled. "But mine isn't. Look at it. You gave it to me only because you scorned to ride in it any longer yourself. It would do for me, you said, but you prance around in a bright shiny one yourself. I blush at the row mine makes; sounds like a boiler factory; I drive only along side streets. If the patients would pay what they owe, I could ride like a lady instead of a slinking magpie." The doctor leaned back in his chair and laughed (they were at breakfast) and remarked that old friends were best. "Don't call my asthmatic tin beast a friend; we're bitter enemies," said she. It carried her to Terry Creek about noon, however, safely enough, whither she went with a firm resolution that crushed a certain embarrassment and anxiety. Suppose these people resented her inquiries.