Canadian fiction -- 20th century; Detective and mystery stories
The young man was a tall fellow; bright-haired, ruddy and smiling, with
beautiful white teeth. He was wearing white flannel trousers of fine
quality rather soiled and a snowy shirt cut off at the elbows and open
to reveal a smooth brown throat. Pen was taken by surprise. Something
about him, the strong bare neck like a column, the laughing eyes that
had yet a sort of hunger in them too, turned her suddenly giddy. She
was furious at her own weakness--and at him for being the cause of it.
If in that moment he had said: "Come!" and had walked off with a curt
jerk of the head, she would have had to follow. It was the secret
consciousness of this that appalled her.
Fortunately for her he was civilized. He merely smiled as a gentleman
may in frank admiration--but not too frank. He was clearly what Pen
called a gentleman. The thought was balm to her soul. For if he had
not been she knew it would have been just the same with her. The first
gentleman she had seen in so many months! It was comforting to be
assured that they still walked the earth.
As in a dream she heard her father saying: "Mr. Donald Counsell ... my
daughter. Her name is Pendleton Broome the same as my own. It is a
family custom."
She heard the young man apologizing for his appearance. "I never
expected to..."
Pen caught him up sharply. "Find white people here? You wouldn't.
From the look of the place."
Both men were disconcerted by her brusqueness. Pen was horribly
ashamed of herself. "I will not blush! ... I will not blush!" she said
to herself, glaring out across the river. After the first glance she
never looked at the young man again, but was nevertheless tinglingly
conscious of his aspect; the fine lines of his body, his fair tanned
skin, and always of those merry, speaking, wistful eyes. "What has
happened to me? ... What has happened to me?" a little voice within her
seemed to be wailing.
The young man tried to smooth things over. "What a heavenly spot! As
I have already told your father, I'm loafing down the Bay in a canoe."
"What do you do when the wind blows?" asked the elder Pendleton.
"Oh, go ashore and sit and smoke by my fire."
"Don't you get lonely?"
A shadow crossed the young man's open countenance. "No, I'm fed up
with people," he said shortly. "... That is, city people," he added
with a glance through his lashes at Pen.
A sudden flame of jealousy burned Pen's breast. "There have been many
women in his life!" And immediately: "Oh, what a fool I am!" she
promptly added.
Pendleton glanced admonishingly at his daughter. Where was the
courtesy to strangers for which the Broomes were famous? The glance
was wasted upon Pen. An awkward silence resulted.
Finally the young man said politely: "I came to see if I could get some
butter and eggs."
"Certainly," said Pen stiffly. "Eggs are twenty cents a dozen, butter
forty cents the pound."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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