"Well, she don"t have to care for his money."
"Oh, no, of course she don"t have to. But they are just the ones that do, my dear. They are just the ones that do."
"Well, it"s a shame."
"Oh, of course it"s a shame."
The woman who had a.s.sembled the corps said to one at her side: "Oh, the commonest kind of people, my dear, the commonest kind. The father is a regular farmer, you know. He drives oxen. Such language! You can really hear him miles away bellowing at those oxen. And the girls are shy, half-wild things--oh, you have no idea! I saw one of them yesterday when we were out driving. She dodged as we came along, for I suppose she was ashamed of her frock, poor child! And the mother--well, I wish you could see her! A little, old, dried-up thing. We saw her carrying a pail of water from the well, and, oh, she bent and staggered dreadfully, poor thing!"
"And the gate to their front yard, it has a broken hinge, you know. Of course, that"s an awful bad sign. When people let their front gate hang on one hinge you know what that means."
After gazing again at the group at the court, the youngest member of the corps said, "Well, he"s a good tennis player anyhow."
The others smiled indulgently. "Oh, yes, my dear, he"s a good tennis player."
CHAPTER XIII.
One day Hollanden said, in greeting, to Hawker, "Well, he"s gone."
"Who?" asked Hawker.
"Why, Oglethorpe, of course. Who did you think I meant?"
"How did I know?" said Hawker angrily.
"Well," retorted Hollanden, "your chief interest was in his movements, I thought."
"Why, of course not, hang you! Why should I be interested in his movements?"
"Well, you weren"t, then. Does that suit you?"
After a period of silence Hawker asked, "What did he--what made him go?"
"Who?"
"Why--Oglethorpe."
"How was I to know you meant him? Well, he went because some important business affairs in New York demanded it, he said; but he is coming back again in a week. They had rather a late interview on the porch last evening."
"Indeed," said Hawker stiffly.
"Yes, and he went away this morning looking particularly elated. Aren"t you glad?"
"I don"t see how it concerns me," said Hawker, with still greater stiffness.
In a walk to the lake that afternoon Hawker and Miss Fanhall found themselves side by side and silent. The girl contemplated the distant purple hills as if Hawker were not at her side and silent. Hawker frowned at the roadway. Stanley, the setter, scouted the fields in a genial gallop.
At last the girl turned to him. "Seems to me," she said, "seems to me you are dreadfully quiet this afternoon."
"I am thinking about my wretched field of stubble," he answered, still frowning.
Her parasol swung about until the girl was looking up at his inscrutable profile. "Is it, then, so important that you haven"t time to talk to me?" she asked with an air of what might have been timidity.
A smile swept the scowl from his face. "No, indeed," he said, instantly; "nothing is so important as that."
She seemed aggrieved then. "Hum--you didn"t look so," she told him.
"Well, I didn"t mean to look any other way," he said contritely. "You know what a bear I am sometimes. Hollanden says it is a fixed scowl from trying to see uproarious pinks, yellows, and blues."
A little brook, a brawling, ruffianly little brook, swaggered from side to side down the glade, swirling in white leaps over the great dark rocks and shouting challenge to the hillsides. Hollanden and the Worcester girls had halted in a place of ferns and wet moss. Their voices could be heard quarrelling above the clamour of the stream.
Stanley, the setter, had sousled himself in a pool and then gone and rolled in the dust of the road. He blissfully lolled there, with his coat now resembling an old door mat.
"Don"t you think Jem is a wonderfully good fellow?" said the girl to the painter.
"Why, yes, of course," said Hawker.
"Well, he is," she retorted, suddenly defensive.
"Of course," he repeated loudly.
She said, "Well, I don"t think you like him as well as I like him."
"Certainly not," said Hawker.
"You don"t?" She looked at him in a kind of astonishment.
"Certainly not," said Hawker again, and very irritably. "How in the wide world do you expect me to like him as well as you like him?"
"I don"t mean as well," she explained.
"Oh!" said Hawker.
"But I mean you don"t like him the way I do at all--the way I expected you to like him. I thought men of a certain pattern always fancied their kind of men wherever they met them, don"t you know? And I was so sure you and Jem would be friends."
"Oh!" cried Hawker. Presently he added, "But he isn"t my kind of a man at all."
"He is. Jem is one of the best fellows in the world."
Again Hawker cried "Oh!"
They paused and looked down at the brook. Stanley sprawled panting in the dust and watched them. Hawker leaned against a hemlock. He sighed and frowned, and then finally coughed with great resolution. "I suppose, of course, that I am unjust to him. I care for you myself, you understand, and so it becomes----"
He paused for a moment because he heard a rustling of her skirts as if she had moved suddenly. Then he continued: "And so it becomes difficult for me to be fair to him. I am not able to see him with a true eye." He bitterly addressed the trees on the opposite side of the glen. "Oh, I care for you, of course. You might have expected it." He turned from the trees and strode toward the roadway. The uninformed and disreputable Stanley arose and wagged his tail.
As if the girl had cried out at a calamity, Hawker said again, "Well, you might have expected it."