"
Nick pulled with resolution.
"Ugh! You're choking me!" she gurgled.
All that water which once had been his heart trickled vaguely and icily
through the wrong veins, upsetting his whole system.
"Forgive me this time!" he implored. "It's going to be right, just as soon
as--as--I find the buttonholes."
"There aren't any. They're loops."
"Oh, those tiny little stick-up things, like loosened threads?"
"Yes. You'll see it's _quite_ easy, after the first."
Oh, was it indeed? Nick suppressed a groan, not at his task, but at his
own oxlike awkwardness (so he anathematized it) that made a torture of a
delicious privilege. Evidently it was a much harder thing to lasso one of
these little pearl atrocities with its alleged "loop" than to rope a
vicious steer. And there were those tangling threads of gold. If he should
hurt her!
The ex-cowboy almost prayed, as, with the caution of a man treading upon
knife-blades on the edge of a precipice, he unwound the two little curls
from the top button of the collar. And perhaps his unconscious appeal for
mercy had its effect, for the tendrils yielded graciously to coaxing. He
would have given a year of his life to kiss one of those curls; a
comparatively worthless year it would be, since, in all probability, it
would be empty of Angela May! Yet no--now that he had touched her like
this, now that he had come so near to her, he felt with all his soul that
he could never let her go.
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