Take her now, for instance, as she swings along the highway, fresh, trim and graceful, her chin uptilted, her cheeks warm, her eyes clear and as blue as sapphires, and we experience the most intense, unreasoning desire to be near her, at her side, where hands could touch her and the very spell of her creep out over one to make a man of him.

The kind of woman one wants to draw close to him because his heart is sweet.

She had the blood of a fellow creature on her hands--the blood of one of us--and yet we men will overlook one commandment for another.

It is a matter of choice.

What of her present position in the house and in the heart of the one woman who of all those we know is abnormally unfeminine in that she subordinates the natural and instinctive animosity of woman toward another who robs her of a husband, no matter how unworthy or how hateful he may have been to her behind the screen with which she hides her sores from the world. The answer is ready: Hetty was a slave bound to an extraordinary condition. There had been no coercion on the part of Challis Wrandall's wife; no actual restraint had been set upon the girl. The situation was a plain one from every point of view: Hetty owed her life to Sara, she would have paid with her life's blood the debt she owed. It had become perfectly natural for her to consider herself a willing, grateful prisoner--a prisoner on parole. She would not, could not abuse the parole. She loved her gaoler with a love that knew no bounds; she loved the walls Sara had thrown up about her; she was content to live and die in the luxurious cell, attended by love and kindness and mercy.

After all, Hetty was even more feminine than we seem able to convey in words.

Not in that she lacked in pride or sensitiveness, but that she possessed to a self-satisfying degree the ability to subordinate both of these to a loyalty that had no bounds. There were fine feelings in Hetty. She was honest with herself. She did not look beyond her present horizon for brighter skies. They were as bright as they could ever be, of that she was sure; her hopes lay within the small circ.u.mference that Sara Wrandall made possible for her.

She knew that her peril, her ruin lay in the desire to step outside that narrow circle, for out there the world was cold and merciless.

She lived as one charmed by some powerful influence, and was content.

Not once had the fear entered her soul that Sara would turn against her. Her trust in Wrandall's wife was infinite. In her simple, devoted heart she could feel no p.r.i.c.k of dread so far as the present was concerned. The past was dreadful, but it was the past, and its loathsomeness was moderated by subtle contrast with the present.

As for the future, it belonged to Sara Wrandall. It was safe.

If Sara were to decide that she must be given up to the law, all well and good. She could meet her fate with a smile for Sara, and with love in her heart. She could pay in full if the demand was made by the wife of the man she had left in the grim little upstairs room at Burton's Inn on that never-to-be-forgotten night in March.

The one great, inexplicable mystery to her was the heart of Sara Wrandall. She could not fathom it.

She could understand her own utter subjection to the will of the other woman; she could explain it satisfactorily to herself, and she could have explained it to the world. Self-preservation in the beginning, self-surrender as time went on, self-sacrifice as the prerogative.

And so it was, on this grey spring day, that she gazed undaunted at the world, with the shadows all about her, and hummed a sprightly tune through warm red lips that were kissed by the morning mist.

She came to the bridge by the mill, long since deserted and now a thing of ruin and decay. A man in knickerbockers stood leaning against the rail, idly gazing down at the trickling stream below.

The brier pipe that formed the circuit between hand and lips sent up soft blue coils to float away on the drizzle.

She pa.s.sed behind him, with a single furtive, curious glance at his handsome, undisturbed profile, and in that glance recognised him as the man she had seen the day before.

When she was a dozen rods away, the tall man turned his face from the stream and sent after her the long-restrained look. There was something akin to cautiousness in that look of his, as if he were afraid that she might turn her head suddenly and catch him at it.

Something began stirring in his heart, the nameless something that awakens when least expected. He felt the subtle, sweet femininity of her as she pa.s.sed. It lingered with him as he looked.

She turned the bend in the road a hundred yards away. For many minutes he studied the stream below without really seeing it.

Then he straightened up, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and set off slowly in her wake, although he had been walking in quite the opposite direction when he came to the bridge,--and on a mission of some consequence, too.

There was the chance that he would meet her coming back.

CHAPTER VII

A FAITHFUL CRAYON-POINT

Leslie Wrandall came out on the eleven-thirty. Hetty was at the station with the motor, a sullen resentment in her heart, but a welcoming smile on her lips. The sun shone brightly. The Sound glared with the white of reflected skies.

"I thought of catching the eight o'clock," he cried enthusiastically, as he dropped his bag beside the motor in order to reach over and shake hands with her. "That would have gotten me here hours earlier.

The difficulty was that I didn't think of the eight o'clock until I awoke at nine."

"And then you had the additional task of thinking about breakfast,"

said Hetty, but without a trace of sarcasm in her manner.

"I never think of breakfast," said he amiably. "I merely eat it.

Of course, it's a task to eat it sometimes, but--well, how are you?

How do you like it out here?"

He was beside her on the broad seat, his face beaming, his gay little moustache pointing upward at the ends like oblique brown exclamation points, so expansive was his smile.

"I adore it," she replied, her own smile growing in response to his.

It was impossible to resist the good nature of him. She could not dislike him, even though she dreaded him deep down in her heart. Her blood was hot and cold by turns when she was with him, as her mind opened and shut to thoughts pleasant and unpleasant with something of the regularity of a fish's gills in breathing.

"I knew you would. It's great. You won't care much for our place, Miss Castleton. Sara's got the pick of the coast in that place of hers. Trust old Sebastian Gooch to get the best of everything. If my dad or my grand-dad had possessed a tenth of the brain that that old chap had, we'd have our own tabernacle up there on the point, instead of sulking at his back gate. That's really where we're located, you know. His back gate opens smack in the face of our front one. I think he did it with malice aforethought, too. His back gate is two miles from the house. It wasn't really necessary to go so far for a back gate as all that, was it? To make it worse, he put a big sign over it for us to read: 'NO TRESPa.s.sING. THIS MEANS YOU.' Sara took it down after the old boy died."

"I suppose by that time the desire to trespa.s.s was gone," she said.

"One doesn't enjoy freedom of that sort."

"I've come to believe that the only free things we really covet are pa.s.ses to the theatre. We never get over that, I'm sure. I'd rather have a pa.s.s to the theatre than a ten dollar bill any time.

I say, it was nice of you to come down to meet me. It was more than I--er--expected." He almost said "hoped for."

"Sara was too busy about the house to come," she explained quickly.

"And I had a few errands to do in the village."

"Don't spoil it!"

"I am a horribly literal person," she said.

"Better that than literally horrible," he retorted, rather proud of himself for it. "It's wonderful, the friendship between you two girls--Sara's not much more than a girl, you see. You're so utterly unlike in every way."

"It isn't strange to me," said she simply, but without looking at him.

"Of course, I can understand it," he went on. "I've always liked Sara. She's bully. Much too good for my brother, G.o.d rest his soul.

He never--"

"Oh, don't utter a thing like that, even in jest," she cried, shocked by his glib remark.

He flushed. "You didn't know Challis," he said almost surlily.

She held her breath.

After a moment, the points of his little moustache went up again in the habitual barometrical smile. Rather a priggish, supercilious smile, she thought, taking a glance at his face.

"I say I can understand it, but mother and Vivian will never be able to get it through those tough skulls of theirs. They really don't like Sara. Sn.o.bs, both of 'em--of the worst kind, too. Why, mother has always looked upon Sara as a--e---a sort of brigandess, the kind that steals children and holds them for ransom. Of course, old man Gooch was as common as rags--utterly impossible, you know--but that shouldn't stand against Sara. By the way, her father called her Sallie. Her mother was a very charming woman, they say. We never knew her. For that matter, we never knew the old man until he became prominent as a father-in-law."

The girl was silent. He went on.

"Mother likes you. She doesn't say it in so many words, but I can see that she wonders how you can have anything in common with Sara. She prides herself on being able to distinguish blue blood at a glance. Silly notion she's got, but--"

"Please don't go on, Mr. Wrandall," cried Hetty in distress.