A Chilhowee Lily | Page 5

the dwelling, all had a glimmer of
dew and a picturesque symmetry, while the spinning wheel as
Loralinda sat in the white effulgent glow seemed to revolve with
flashes of light in lieu of spokes, and the thread she drew forth was as
silver. Its murmuring rune was hardly distinguishable from the chant of
the cicada or the long droning in strophe and antistrophe of the
waterside frogs far away, but such was the whir or her absorption that
she did not perceive his approach till his shadow fell athwart the
threshold, and she looked up with a start.
"Ye 'pear powerful busy a-workin' hyar so late in the night," he
exclaimed with a jocose intonation.
She smiled, a trifle abashed; then evidently conscious of the bizarre
suggestions of so much ill-timed industry, she explained, softly
drawling: "Waal, ye know, Granny, she be so harried with her
rheumatics ez she gits along powerful poor with her wheel, an' by night
she be plumb out'n heart an' mad fur true. So arter she goes ter bed I jes'
spins a passel fur her, an' nex' mornin' she 'lows she done a toler'ble
stint o' work an' air consider'ble s'prised ez she war so easy put out."
She laughed a little, but he did not respond. With his sensibilities all
jarred by the perfidious insinuation of Ozias Crann, and his jealousy all
on the alert, he noted and resented the fact that at first her attention had
come back reluctantly to him, and that he, standing before her, had
been for a moment a less definitely realized presence than the thought
in her mind--this thought had naught to do with him, and of that he was
sure.

"Loralindy," he said with a turbulent impulse of rage and grief; "whenst
ye promised to marry me ye an' me war agreed that we would never
hev one thought hid from one another--ain't that a true word!"
The wheel had stopped suddenly--the silver thread was broken; she was
looking up at him, the moonlight full on the straight delicate lineaments
of her pale face, and the smooth glister of her golden hair. "Not o' my
own," she stipulated. And he remembered, and wondered that it should
come to him so late, that she had stood upon this reservation and that
he--poor fool--had conceded it, thinking it concerned the distilling of
whisky in defiance of the revenue law, in which some of her relatives
were suspected to be engaged, and of which he wished to know as little
as possible.
The discovery of his fatuity was not of soothing effect. "'T war that
man Renfrew's secret--I hearn about his letter what war read down ter
the mill."
She nodded acquiescently, her expression once more abstracted, her
thoughts far afield.
He had one moment of triumph as he brought himself tensely erect,
shouldering his gun--his shadow behind him in the moonlight
duplicated the gesture with a sharp promptness as at a word of
command.
"All the mounting's a-diggin' by this time!" He laughed with ready
scorn, then experienced a sudden revulsion of feeling. Her face had
changed. Her expression was unfamiliar. She had caught together the
two ends of the broken thread, and was knotting them with a steady
hand, and a look of composed security on her face, that was itself a
flout to the inopportune search of the mountaineers and boded ill to his
hope to discover from her the secret of the cache. He recovered himself
suddenly.
"Ye 'lowed ter me ez ye never keered nuthin' fur that man, Renfrow,"
he said with a plaintive appeal, far more powerful with her than scorn.

She looked up at him with candid reassuring eyes. "I never keered none
fur him," she protested. "He kem hyar all shot up, with the miners an'
mounting boys hot foot arter him--an' we done what we could fur him.
Gran'daddy 'lowed ez he warn't 'spon-sible fur whut the owners done,
or hedn't done at the mine, an' he seen no sense in shootin' one man ter
git even with another."
"But ye kep' his secret!" Kinnicutt persisted.
"What fur should I tell it--'t ain't mine?"
"That thar money in that box he buried ain't his'n, nuther!" he argued.
There was an inscrutable look in her clear eyes. She had risen, and was
standing in the moonlight opposite him. The shadows of the vines
falling over her straight skirt left her face and hair the fairer in the
silver glister.
"'Pears like ter me," he broke the silence with his plaintive cadence, "ez
ye ought ter hev tole me. I ain't keerin' ter know 'ceptin' ye hev shet me
out. It hev hurt my feelin's powerful ter be treated that-a-way. Tell me
now--or lemme go forever!"
She was suddenly trembling from head to