There could be but one reasonable explanation.... Confound women, anyway!

"I had not meant to speak, yet," he went on, out of the clamoring mult.i.tude of his thoughts. "I felt that we ought--"

He became suddenly aware of Lydia's eyes. There was no soft answering fire, no maidenly uncertainty of hope and fear in those clear depths.

"It is very difficult for me to talk of this to you," she said slowly. "You will think me over-bold--unmannerly, perhaps. But I can't help that. I should never have thought of your caring for me--you will at least do me the justice to believe that."

"Lydia!" he interrupted, poignantly distressed by her evident timidity--her exquisite hesitation, "let me speak! I understand--I know--"

She forbade him with a gesture, at once pleading and peremptory.

"No," she said. "No! I began this, I must go on to the end. What you ought to understand is this: I am not like other women. I want only friendship from every one. I shall never ask more. I can never accept more--from any one. I want you to know this--now."

"But I--do you realize--"

"I want your friendship," she went on, facing him with a sort of desperate courage; "but more than any kindness you can offer me, Mr.

Elliot, I want the friendship of f.a.n.n.y Dodge, of Ellen Dix--of all good women. I need it! Now you know why I showed you the picture. If you will not give it to her, I shall. I want her--I want every one--to understand that I shall never come between her and the slightest hope she may have cherished before my coming to Brookville.

All I ask is--leave to live here quietly--and be friendly, as opportunity offers."

Her words, her tone were not to be mistaken. But even the sanest and wisest of men has never thus easily surrendered the jealously guarded stronghold of s.e.x. Wesley Elliot's youthful ideas of women were totally at variance with the disconcerting conviction which strove to invade his mind. He had experienced not the slightest difficulty, up to the present moment, in cla.s.sifying them, neatly and logically; but there was no s.p.a.ce in his mental files for a woman such as Lydia Orr was representing herself to be. It was inconceivable, on the face of it! All women demanded admiration, courtship, love. They always had; they always would. The literature of the ages attested it. He had been too precipitate--too hasty. He must give her time to recover from the shock she must have experienced from hearing the spiteful gossip about himself and f.a.n.n.y Dodge. On the whole, he admired her courage. What she had said could not be attributed to the mere promptings of vulgar s.e.x-jealousy. Very likely f.a.n.n.y had been disagreeable and haughty in her manner. He believed her capable of it. He sympathized with f.a.n.n.y; with the curious mental apt.i.tude of a sensitive nature, he still loved f.a.n.n.y. It had cost him real effort to close the doors of his heart against her.

"I admire you more than I can express for what you have had the courage to tell me," he a.s.sured her. "And you will let me see that I understand--more than you think."

"It is impossible that you should understand," she said tranquilly.

"But you will, at least, remember what I have said?"

"I will," he promised easily. "I shall never forget it!"

A slight humorous smile curved the corners of his handsome mouth.

"Now this--er--what shall we call it?--'bone of contention' savors too strongly of wrath and discomfiture; so we'll say, simply and specifically, this photograph--which chances to have a harmless quotation inscribed upon its reverse: Suppose I drop it in the waste-basket? I can conceive that it possesses no particular significance or value for any one. I a.s.sure you most earnestly that it does not--for me."

He made as though he would have carelessly torn the picture across, preparatory to making good his proposal.

She stopped him with a swift gesture.

"Give it to me," she said. "It is lost property, and I am responsible for its safe-keeping."

She perceived that she had completely failed in her intention.

"What are you going to do with it?" he inquired, with an easy a.s.sumption of friendliness calculated to put her more completely at her ease with him.

"I don't know. For the present, I shall put it back in my desk."

"Better take my advice and destroy it," he persisted. "It--er--is not valuable evidence. Or--I believe on second thought I shall accept your suggestion and return it myself to its probable owner."

He was actually laughing, his eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with boyish mischief.

"I think it belongs to Miss Dix," he told her audaciously.

"To Miss Dix?" she echoed.

"Yes; why not? Don't you see the fair Ellen among the group?"

Her eyes blazed suddenly upon him; her lips trembled.

"Forgive me!" he cried, aghast at his own folly.

She retreated before his outstretched hands.

"I didn't mean to--to make light of what appears so serious a matter to you," he went on impetuously. "It is only that it is _not_ serious; don't you see? It is such a foolish little mistake. It must not come between us, Lydia!"

"Please go away, at once," she interrupted him breathlessly, "and--and _think_ of what I have said to you. Perhaps you didn't believe it; but you _must_ believe it!"

Then, because he did not stir, but instead stood gazing at her, his puzzled eyes full of questions, entreaties, denials, she quietly closed a door between them. A moment later he heard her hurrying feet upon the stair.

Chapter XV

August was a month of drought and intense heat that year; by the first week in September the stream had dwindled to the merest silver thread, its wasted waters floating upward in clouds of impalpable mist at dawn and evening to be lost forever in the empty vault of heaven. Behind the closed shutters of the village houses, women fanned themselves in the intervals of labor over superheated cookstoves. Men consulted their thermometers with incredulous eyes.

Springs reputed to be unfailing gradually ceased their cool trickle.

Wells and cisterns yielded little save the hollow sound of the questing bucket. There was serious talk of a water famine in Brookville. At the old Bolton house, however, there was still water in abundance. In jubilant defiance of blazing heavens and parching earth the Red-Fox Spring--tapped years before by Andrew Bolton and piped a mile or more down the mountain side, that his household, garden and stock might never lack of pure cold water--gushed in undiminished volume, filling and overflowing the new cement reservoir, which had been one of Lydia Orr's cautious innovations in the old order of things.

The repairs on the house were by now finished, and the new-old mansion, shining white amid the chastened luxuriance of ancient trees, once more showed glimpses of snowy curtains behind polished windowpanes. Flowers, in a lavish prodigality of bloom the Bolton house of the past had never known, flanked the old stone walls, bordered the drives, climbed high on trellises and arbors, and blazed in serried ranks beyond the broad sweep of velvet turf, which repaid in emerald freshness its daily share of the friendly water.

Mrs. Abby Daggett gazed at the scene in rapt admiration through the clouds of dust which uprose from under Dolly's scuffling feet.

"Ain't that place han'some, now she's fixed it up?" she demanded of Mrs. Deacon Whittle, who sat bolt upright at her side, her best summer hat, spa.r.s.ely decorated with purple flowers, protected from the suffocating clouds of dust by a voluminous brown veil. "I declare I'd like to stop in and see the house, now it's all furnished up--if only for a minute."

"We ain't got time, Abby," Mrs. Whittle pointed out. "There's work to cut out after we get to Mis' Dix's, and it was kind of late when we started."

Mrs. Daggett relinquished her random desire with her accustomed amiability. Life consisted mainly in giving up things, she had found; but being cheerful, withal, served to cast a mellow glow over the severest denials; in fact, it often turned them into something unexpectedly rare and beautiful.

"I guess that's so, Ann," she agreed. "Dolly got kind of fractious over his headstall when I was harnessin'. He don't seem to like his sun hat, and I dunno's I blame him. I guess if our ears stuck up through the top of our bunnits like his we wouldn't like it neither."

Mrs. Whittle surveyed the animal's grotesquely bonneted head with cold disfavor.

"What simple ideas you do get into your mind, Abby," said she, with the air of one conscious of superior intellect. "A horse ain't human, Abby. He ain't no idea he's wearing a hat.... The Deacon says their heads get hotter with them rediculous bunnits on. He favors a green branch."

"Well," said Mrs. Daggett, foiling a suspicious movement of Dolly's switching tail, "mebbe that's so; I feel some cooler without a hat.

But 'tain't safe to let the sun beat right down, the way it does, without something between. Then, you see, Henry's got a lot o' these horse hats in the store to sell. So of course Dolly, he has to wear one."

Mrs. Whittle cautiously wiped the dust from her hard red cheeks.

"My! if it ain't hot," she observed. "You're so fleshy, Abby, I should think you'd feel it something terrible."