"Just that," said Mr. Jonas. "Hasn't her very incompetency made the boy?"

CHAPTER THREE

For the next three days Mr. Henderson avoided them. He spoke in the hall or dining-room, to be sure, but joined them no more in plans or on the gallery.

And Molly turned petulant. Why had they ever come to Aden, she moaned.

"Can't you propose something, Malise?" she besought.

Alexina, endeavouring to write letters, felt tired. She had been up at Molly's call a dozen times in the night.

"We're going to spend to-morrow with Mrs. Leroy," she reminded her mother.

"She looks like Mrs. Malaprop," said Molly crossly.

The daughter's face flushed. Youth is rawly sensitive to ridicule of its friends. Besides, what would they find at Lake Nancy? It would be poor, she expected that, and it might be--pitiful? Not to her, not to her, but Molly was so unable to see behind things. If a thing was poor to Molly it was only poor and she said so. Alexina hoped her mother would not go.

But when Friday came Molly, in feverish, restless state, was ready for anything and even brightened up over it, while it was Alexina who was petulant, and put on one dress and took it off, and tried another, even with William Leroy down-stairs in the wagonette, waiting.

But she felt better as she came out into the sunshine and the dress she had finally decided on seemed to settle on her into sudden jauntiness.

William shook hands. There was a comfortable sense of humour about him.

"It's fair to divide families into component parts on occasions," he stated, and put Alexina in a place by his own and Molly behind. Molly pouted.

"And, besides, we are going to drop Henderson at a sick parishioner's on the way," he said, with a naughty glance at her. "I met him starting to the livery stable just now and stopped him."

Molly's face cleared. She met his eyes with insouciance, but, somehow, one felt all at once that she liked him better.

Mr. Henderson came out with a satchel and climbed in. He looked stern and uninviting, Alexina thought, but the note of Molly's random remarkings promptly brightened. w.i.l.l.y flicked the whip above the big grey span and off they trotted across town, westward.

The morning was keen enough that the sun's warmth was pleasant and quickened the blood. Aden was left behind. Here and there on the outskirts frame houses, crudely and hideously cheap, were building.

Land everywhere was being cleared, the felled trees lying about, the whirl of a portable sawmill telling their destiny, while burning stumps filled the air with creosote pungency.

Then the despoilments of progress were left behind and the untouched pine woods closed about them, and trees rose tall, straight, twigless, to where a never-ceasing murmur soughed, and the light came sifting, speckled, and flickering through the gloom, upon the sandy ground and scrub palmetto beneath.

Alexina breathed deep. It was quiet, and peaceful and solemn.

"Isn't it?" said William sociably.

She looked up; she hadn't spoken.

The trees thinned, grew spa.r.s.e, and the road came out into the open. A mile farther on they entered a belt of hummock land, a wild growth of live-oak, cypress, magnolias, thicketed, intertwisted, rank. Grey moss trailed and swept their faces as they pa.s.sed under, vines clambered and swung and festooned, gophers crawled out of the path, and a gleaming snake slid across the road and into the palmetto undergrowth.

He was looking at her as they came out, she flushed and ecstatic.

"But wait," said he, "until I show it to you after a while in bloom."

Just beyond the hummock he drew rein at a clearing before an unpainted frame house, even cheaper and more hideous than the most. Mr.

Henderson got out, King handing the satchel after him.

"It's a death-bed," he said under his breath to the two, as the minister went toward the house; "that's the pitiful part of it down here, people taking all they've got to get here, only to die."

"Don't--don't tell about it," said Molly sharply.

William Leroy touched the mules and they went on. A little later Alexina felt Molly's hand upon her. "Come back with me, Malise," she begged. Her face looked drawn and grey.

"But we're there," explained King, and a minute after turned in at an old iron gate, flanked by two ancient live-oaks. An osage hedge, cut back upon its woody stock, stretched about the place either side from the gate. Within, the driveway made a sweep off towards buildings in the rear, while a sh.e.l.l path led up to the house, which was of frame, wide, with porches across the front, up-stairs and down. Bermuda gra.s.s covered the sandy surface of the yard, which was large and sloped back towards the lake, visible through the grove. Here and there a banana plant reared its ragged luxuriance and a stunted palm or two struggled upward; there was on old rustic seat beneath a gnarled wild orange tree.

As w.i.l.l.y helped them out, Charlotte appeared and came animatedly down the path between the borders of crepe myrtle. Alexina ran ahead to meet her. The girl's hands were quite cold. Mrs. Leroy's white dress, relic of bygone fashion, fluttered with rose-coloured ribbons, and suddenly Alexina seemed to see a wide old cottage in a shrub-grown yard, and on its porch a lady in a gauzy dress with rosy ribbons, gathering a little child into her lap.

The girl threw her arms about this Charlotte in the old white dress, and then, because her eyes were full of foolish tears, ran on, for the Captain was on the porch, in a cane arm-chair, a line of blue smoke trailing up from the cigar in his fingers. Laughing and breathless she went up the steps and their eyes met. Never a word spoke either, but the hand of the man closed on the girl's and rested there until the others came up.

"w.i.l.l.y wouldn't let me do a thing about your coming, Alexina," Mrs.

Leroy began, as she reached them; "he said he'd tend to it himself and wouldn't let me give a direction. He's fussy sometimes and notionate, like the time when the surveyors were staying with us, and Mandy set some dishes on a chair. I'd already told him she didn't know how to clear a table for dessert, and he said I ought to have taught her."

The girl's eyes danced. "You're all of you the same, the very same; not one of the three has changed."

Charlotte beamed. She took it with undisguised pleasure that she had not changed.

King came round the house. He had taken the mules to the stable. "I'm holding you to that bargain," he reminded Alexina.

Molly looked bored. Such things were only playful and interesting as she was part of them. Then she said she was tired, evidently having no mind for a morning with Mrs. Leroy.

"You shall go up and lie down in my room," said Charlotte.

The three women went in. The hall dividing the house was wide and high, its floor of boards a foot wide, and bare but for a central strip of carpet; an old mahogany hat-tree stood against one wall, a mahogany sofa against the other, with straight backed chairs flanking both. It was all labouriously clean and primly bare.

The rooms up-stairs were big, with old mahogany furniture set squarely about them.

"They didn't want me to bring the furniture, w.i.l.l.y and his father, when we came," Charlotte told Alexina; "it cost more to get it here than to buy new, but I didn't want new; I wanted this."

Everything was innocent of covers or hangings, nor were there any pictures. She explained this.

"I don't know how to drive nails," she told them, "and w.i.l.l.y and the Captain don't care. w.i.l.l.y had the house papered this fall in case of people coming about buying, and the papering men took the nails out the walls and he won't bother to put them in. They're all in here."

Charlotte didn't mean the nails; she threw open a closet door and ancestral Ransomes, neatly set against the walls, peered out of the dark.

Alexina put a hand over Charlotte's on the door k.n.o.b. Molly yawned.

"It seems chilly here in my room," said Charlotte; "the sun isn't round this side yet. Put your hats on the bed and Mrs. Garnier shall go lie on w.i.l.l.y's sofa."

They followed her across the hall. "He has his bed and things in there," she explained, nodding towards an adjoining room, "and he keeps his books and such in here."

On the floor, otherwise uncarpeted, lay a bearskin. There was a sofa against the wall and a plain deal table in the centre of the room, piled with papers, books and pipes, about a lamp. There were some chairs; a gun-rack, antlers, an alligator skin and some coloured prints of English hunting scenes on the walls, and an old-fashioned, bra.s.s-mounted cellarette hung in an angle. The south window looked out across the grove upon Nancy; between the two east windows stood an old secretary book-case.