Free Corral Nocturne by Elisabeth Grace Foley Page A

out of sight in the
dark, but out on the flat near the road was an abandoned corral,
partly tumbled down and with traces of the turn-off to the
overgrown yard beside it. Cole went on for a few steps toward this
before he spoke again. A couple of lower rails of the old corral
that had fallen partly off slanted down into the grass together,
making a place that would do as a rough seat, and he set Ellie down
on it and knelt beside her. “Ellie, please tell me what’s wrong.
Have I done something to upset you?”
    “No,” said Ellie, her voice very low. She was
thinking, a little remorsefully, of how much the reverse was true;
how kind he had always been to her. It was not his fault.
    She kept her eyes down, but Cole was still
watching her earnestly. “Has someone else?”
    Ellie shook her head. “No…It isn’t anything I
can—it’s just that I’ve made an awful fool of myself, and I want to
go home.”
    Cole persisted. “But it has something to do
with tonight, hasn’t it? Why did you leave so early? If you’d asked
me I would have taken you; you know that.”
    “But I didn’t want you to—I mean, I wish you
wouldn’t always feel you have to—”
    Cole slapped the palm of his hand on his knee
in exasperation. “There you go again! I can’t figure out why you
keep talking in riddles. Now, you listen here, Eleanor
Strickland—”
    “My name is Isabella,” Ellie interrupted him,
rather flatly.
    Cole was momentarily flummoxed. He looked at
her, and attempted to gather his thoughts again. “All right,” he
said, “Isabella,” and then he laughed, quite unable to help
himself.
    He leaned forward; his voice had that little
persuasive ring in it that she found so hard to resist. “Ellie,
won’t you just tell me? I won’t laugh at you, and I won’t blame
you, honestly. I just can’t help feeling I’ve done something
wrong.”
    Ellie was looking down at the faint shadow of
the old corral cast by the moonlight. Her resistance was wearing
away. She felt limp and defeated, and that none of it really
mattered any longer anyway. But she still had a few shreds of pride
left; she could not tell him exactly why she had fled so humiliated
from the dance.
    She hesitated, faltered a little, and began.
“I know you’ve only wanted to be kind to me,” she said. She bit her
lip, for her eyes were again full of tears. “And I—I appreciate
every bit of it. But I don’t want you to go on feeling that
you— ought to be kind to me, that you need to do things for
me. I don’t want you to be under an obligation. And I understand,
truly, if—if you’d rather not.”
    Cole had been listening seriously, his brow
knitted as if he were endeavoring to understand. A queer shade of
thoughtfulness passed over his face as she finished, and then it
slowly cleared.
    “You mean,” he said quietly, “that you think
I only asked you to the dance as a favor to you—that I’ve been
taking you to picnics and things just because I was sorry for you,
and wanted you to have a nice time? Is that it?”
    Ellie did not speak or look at him, but a
single tear splashed on her wrist. It glistened for a second in the
moonlight and she whisked it hastily away, certain he must have
seen it.
    “That’s it?”
    Still no answer.
    “All right. I’ll tell you then. When I asked
you to the picnic that first time, that’s just about how I felt. I
did it because I thought you were a nice kid who deserved to have a
good time, and that I’d take you and show some of the other people
around here what they’d been missing by leaving you out. That’s
what I meant at first. But”—suddenly his arms were around her, and
her heart fluttered up at the unexpectedness of it and the
sensation of being held so close—“the reason I’m here with you
right now, tonight, is because I love you, Ellie. I love you, I love you. Can you understand that?”
    Ellie could not answer. She heard the words
and understood them, but the meaning still floated