Sheila at this began to laugh.  She caught her breath.  She laughed and cried together.

Sylvester patted her shoulder.  “Poor kid!  You’re all in.  Late hours too much for you, I reckon.  Come on now—­tell Pap everything.  Ease off your heart.  It’s wonderful what crying does for the nervous system.  I laid out on a prairie one night when I was about your age and just naturally bawled.  You’d ‘a’ thought I was a baby steer, hanged if you wouldn’t ‘a’ thought so.  It’s the fight scared you plumb to pieces.  Carthy told me about it and how you let the good-looking kid out by the back.  I seen him ride off toward Hidden Creek this morning.  He was a real pretty boy too.  Say, Sheila, wasn’t you ever kissed?”

“No,” said Sheila.  “And I don’t want to be.”  Sylvester laughed with a little low cackle of intense pleasure and amusement.  “Well, you shan’t be.  No, you shan’t.  Nobody shall kiss Sheila!”

His method seemed to him successful.  Sheila stopped crying and stopped laughing, dried her eyes, murmured, “I’m all right now, thank you, Mr. Hudson,” and fell into an abysmal silence.

He talked smoothly, soothingly, skillfully, confident of his power to manage “gels.”  Once in a while he saw her teeth gleam as though she smiled.  As they came back to Millings in the afterglow of a brief Western twilight, she unfastened her veil and showed a quiet, thoughtful face.

She thanked him, gave him her hand.  “Don’t come up, please, Mr. Hudson,” she said with that cool composure of which at times she was surprisingly capable.  “I shall have my dinner sent up and take a little rest before I go to work.”

“You feel O.K.?” he asked her doubtfully.  His brown eyes had an almost doglike wistfulness.

“Quite, thank you.”  Her easy, effortless smile passed across her face and in and out of her eyes.

Hudson stood beside his wheel tapping his teeth and staring after her.  The rockers on the veranda stopped their rocking, stopped their talking, stopped their breathing to see Sheila pass.  When she had gone, they fastened their attention upon Sylvester.  He was not aware of them.  He stood there a full three minutes under the glare of publicity.  Then he sighed and climbed into his car.

CHAPTER XII

HUDSON’S QUEEN

The lobby, empty of its crowd when Sheila passed through it on her way up to her rooms, was filled by a wheezy, bullying voice.  In front of the desk a little barrel of a man with piggish eyes was disputing his bill with Dickie.  At the sound of Sheila’s entrance he turned, stopped his complaint, watched her pass, and spat into a near-by receptacle.  Sheila remembered that he had visited the bar early in the evening before, and had guzzled his whiskey and made some wheezy attempts at gallantry.  Dickie, flushed, his hair at wild odds with composure, was going over the bill.  In the midst of his calculations the man would interrupt him with a plump dirty forefinger pounced upon the paper.  “Wassa meanin’ of this item, f’rinstance?  Highway robbery, thassa meanin’ of it.  My wife take breakfast in her room?  I’d like to see her try it!”