A Chilhowee Lily | Page 5

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 foot. Pale she was always. Now she was ghastly. "Rufe Kinnicutt," she said with the solemnity of an adjuration, "ye don't keer fur sech ez this, fur nuthin'. An' I promised!"
He noted her agitation. He felt the clue in his grasp. He sought to wield his power, "Choose a-twixt us! Choose a-twixt the promise ye made ter that man--or the word ye deny ter me! An' when I'm