Lodusky | Page 6

no harm," she said. "I was--dressin' up a bit. It aint nobody's business."
"That's true," he answered coolly. "At all events it is not mine--though it is rather late for a lady to be alone at such a place. However, if you have no objection, I will get what I came for and go back."
She said nothing when he stepped down and filled the gourd, but she regarded him with a sort of irritable watchfulness as he drank.
"Are ye--are ye a-goin' to tell?" she faltered, when he had finished.
"No," he answered as coolly as before. "Why should I?"
Then he gave her a long look from head to foot The dress was a poor enough velveteen and had a cast-off air, but it clung to her figure finely, and its sleeves were picturesque with puffs at the shoulder and slashings of white,--indeed the moonlight made her all black and white; her eyes, which were tawny brown by day, were black as velvet now under the straight lines of her brows, and her face was pure dead fairness itself.
When, his look ended, his eyes met hers, she drew back with an impatient movement. .
"Ye look as if--as if ye thought I didn't get it honest," she exclaimed petulantly, "but I did."
That drew his glance toward her dress again, for of course she referred to that, and he could not help asking her a point-blank question.
"Where did you get it?" he said.
There was a slow flippancy about the manner of her reply which annoyed him by its variance with her beauty--but the beauty! How the moonlight and the black and white brought it out as she leaned against the rock, looking at him from under her lashes!
"Are ye goin' to tell the folks up at the house?" she demanded. "They don't know nothin' and I don't want 'em to know."
He shrugged his shoulder negatively.
She laughed with a hint of cool slyness and triumph.
"I got it at Asheville," she said. "I went with father when they was a show thar, 'n' the women stayed at the same tavern we was at, 'n' one of 'em tuk up with me 'n' I done somethin' for her--carried a letter or two," breaking into the sly, triumphant laugh again, "'n' she giv' me the dress fur pay. What d'ye think of it? Is it becomin'?"
The suddenness of the change of manner with which she said these last words was indescribable. She stood upright, her head up, her hands fallen at her sides, her eyes cool and straight--her whole presence confronting him with the power of which she was conscious.
"Is it?" she repeated.
He was a gentleman from instinct and from training, having ordinarily quite a lofty repugnance for all profanity and brusqueness, and yet some how,--account for it as you will,--he had the next instant answered her with positive brutality.
"Yes," he answered, "Damnably!"
When the words were spoken and he heard their sound fall upon the soft night air, he was as keenly disgusted as he would have been if he had heard them uttered by another man. It was not until afterward when he had had leisure to think the matter over that he comprehended vaguely the force which had moved him.
But his companion received them without discomfiture. Indeed, it really occurred to him at the moment that there was a possibility that she would have been less pleased with an expression more choice.
"I come down here to-night," she said, "because I never git no chance to do nothin' up at the house. I'm not a-goin' to let them know. Never mind why, but ye mustn't tell 'em."
He felt haughtily anxious to get back to his proper position.
"Why should I?" he said again. "It is no concern of mine."
Then for the first time he noticed the manner in which she had striven to dress her hair in the style of her model, Rebecca Noble, and this irritated him unendurably. He waved his hand toward it with a gesture of distaste.
"Don't do that again," he said. "That is not becoming at least "--though he was angrily conscious that it was.
She bent over the spring with a hint of alarm in her expression.
"Aint it?" she said, and the eager rapidity with which she lifted her hands and began to alter it almost drew a smile from him despite his mood.
"I done it like hern," she began, and stopped suddenly to look up at him. "You know her," she added; "they're at Harney's. Father said ye'd went to see her jest as soon as ye got here."
"I know her," was his short reply.
He picked up the drinking-gourd and turned away.
"Good-night," he said.
"Good-night."
At the top of the rocky incline he looked back at her.
She was kneeling upon the brink of the spring, her sleeve pushed up to her shoulder, her hand and arm