Galusha did not speak.  The same queer ecstatic brightness was upon his face and he was looking now, not at the grinning cherub, but at the distant horizon line of gray-green ocean and slate-gray sky.  Cabot’s grip on his shoulder tightened.

“So you really want to marry her,” he said. . . .  “Humph! . . .  Well, I’ll be hanged!  Loosh, you—­you—­well, you certainly can surprise a fellow when you really make a business of it.”

The brightness was fading from Galusha’s face.  He sighed, removed his spectacles, and seemed to descend from the clouds.  He sighed again, and then smiled his faint smile.

“Dear me,” he said, “how ridiculous it was, wasn’t it?  You like a joke, don’t you, Cousin Gussie?”

“Was it a joke, Loosh?  You didn’t look nor speak like a joker.”

“Eh?  Oh, yes, it was a joke, of course.  Is it likely that a woman like that would marry me?”

Again he astonished his relative into turning and staring at him.  “Marry you?” he cried.  “She marry you?  For heaven’s sake, you don’t imagine there is any doubt that she would marry you if you asked her to, do you?”

“Why, of course.  Why should she?”

“Why should she?  Why shouldn’t she jump at the chance, you mean!”

“Oh—­oh, no, I don’t.  No, indeed.  You are joking again, Cousin Gussie, of course you are.  Women don’t like me; they laugh at me, they always have, you know.  I don’t blame them.  Very often I laugh at myself.  I am eccentric.  I’m ‘queer’; that is what every one says I am—­queer.  I don’t seem to think just as other people do, or—­or to be able to dress as they do—­or—­ah—­oh, dear, everything.  It used to trouble me a good deal when I was young.  I used to try, you know—­ah—­try very hard not to be queer.  I hated being queer.  But it wasn’t any use, so at last I gave up trying.  My kind of queerness is something one can’t get over, apparently; it’s a sort of incurable disease.  Dear me, yes, quite incurable.”

He had moved forward and his coat-tails had fallen into their normal position, so the “queerness” of his outward appearance was modified; but, as he stood there, with his puzzled, wistful expression, slowly and impersonally picking himself to pieces, so to speak, Cabot felt an overwhelming rush of pity for him, pity and a sort of indignant impatience.

“Oh, shut up, Galusha!” he snapped.  “Don’t be so confoundedly absurd.  You are one of the cleverest men in the world in your line.  You are distinguished.  You are brilliant.  If you were as queer as Dick’s hatband—­whatever that is—­it would make no difference; you have a right to be.  And when you tell me that a woman—­yes, almost any woman, to say nothing of one lost down here in these sand-hills—­wouldn’t marry you in a minute, you’re worse than queer—­you’re crazy, absolutely crazy.”

“But—­but Cousin Gussie, you forget.  If there were no other reasons, you forget what I have done.  She could never believe in me again.  No, nor forgive me.”