"I'm so glad you think that! You are so utterly different from what I imagined you!"

"I could never have imagined you," he said, "never."

"I must be terribly outre."

"You are so many women in one. When I listened to your harp playing I could hardly believe it was the same you I saw galloping across the fields that morning. Now you are a different woman from both of those."

As she looked at him, her lips curled corner-wise, her foot slipped on the sheer edge of the turf. She swayed toward him and he caught her, feeling for a sharp instant the adorable nearness of her body. It ridged all his skin with a creeping delight. She recovered her footing with an exclamation, and turned back somewhat abruptly to the porch where she seated herself on the step, drawing her filmy skirt aside to make a place for him. There was a moment of silence which he broke.

"That exquisite serenade you were playing! You know the words, of course."

"They are more lovely, if possible, than the score. Do you care for poetry?"

"I've always loved it," he said. "I've been reading some lately--a little old-fashioned book I found at Damory Court. It's _Lucile_. Do you know it?"

"Yes. It's my mother's favorite."

He drew it from his pocket. "See, I've got it here. It's marked, too."

He opened it, to close it instantly--not, however, before she had put out her hand and laid it, palm down, on the page. "That rose! Oh, let me have it!"

"Never!" he protested. "Look here. When I put it between the leaves, I did so at random. I didn't see till now that I had opened it at a marked pa.s.sage."

"Let us read it," she said.

He leaned and held the leaf to the light from the doorway and the two heads bent together over the text.

A sound fell behind them and both turned. A slight figure, in a soft gray gown with old lace at the throat, stood in the doorway behind them.

John Valiant sprang to his feet.

"Ah, Shirley, I thought I heard voices. Is that you, Chilly?"

"It's not Mr. Lusk, mother," said Shirley. "It's our new neighbor, Mr.

Valiant."

As he bent over the frail hand, murmuring the conventional words that presentations are believed to require, Mrs. Dandridge sank into a deep cushioned chair. "Won't you sit down?" she said. He noticed that she did not look directly at him, and that her face was as pallid as her hair.

"Thank you," said John Valiant, and resumed his place on the lower step.

Shirley, who had again seated herself, suddenly laughed, and pointed to the book which lay between them. "Imagine what we were doing, dearest!

We were reading _Lucile_ together."

She saw the other wince, and the deep dark eyes lifted, as if under compulsion, from the book-cover to Valiant's face. He was startled by Shirley's cry and the sudden limp unconscious settling-back into the cushions of the fragile form.

CHAPTER XXVIII

NIGHT

A quicker breeze was stirring as John Valiant went back along the Red Road. It brushed the fraying clouds from the sky, leaving it a pale gray-blue, sprinkled with wan stars. He had waited in the garden at Rosewood till Shirley, aided by Emmaline and with Ranston's anxious face hovering in the background, having performed those gentle offices which a woman's fainting spell requires, had come to rea.s.sure him and to say good night.

The road seemed no longer dark; it swam before him now in a soft winged mistiness with here and there an occasional cedar thrusting grotesquely above huddled cobble-wall and black-lined rail-fence. As he went, her form swam before him. The texture of each shadowy bush seemed that gauzy drapery, sprayed with lilies-of-the-valley, and the leaves syllabled her name in cautious whispers. That brief touch of her, when he had caught her in his arms, lingered, as the memory of the harp music on his inner ear, p.r.i.c.king his senses like fine musk, a thing of soft new pulses flashing over him like spurts of vapor.

As he threw off his coat in the bedroom he had chosen for his own, he felt the hard corner of the _Lucile_ in the pocket, and drawing it out, laid it on the table by the bedside. He seemed to feel again the tingle of his cheek where a curling strand of her coppery hair had sprung against it when her head had bent beside his own to read the marked lines. By now perhaps that riotous crown was all unbound and falling redly about her shoulders, those shoulders no longer peeping from a weave of lilies, but draped in virginal white. Perhaps she knelt now by her silk-covered bed, warming the coverlid with her breast, her down-bent face above her locked palms. What did she pray for, he wondered. As a child, his own prayers had been comprehensive ones. Even the savages who lived at Wishing-House and their innumerable offspring had been regularly included in those pet.i.tions.

When he had undressed he sat an hour in the candle-blaze, a dressing-gown thrown over his shoulders, striving vainly to recreate that evening call, to remember her every word and look and movement. For a breath her face would flush suddenly before him, like a live thing; then it would mysteriously fade and elude him, though he clenched his hands on the arms of his chair in the fierce mental effort to recall it.

Only the intense blue of her eyes, the tawny sweep of her hair--these and the touch of her, the consciousness of her warm and vivid fragrance, remained to wrap all his senses in a mist woven of gold and fire.

Shirley, meanwhile, had sat some time beside her mother's bed, leaning from a white chintz-covered chair, her anxiety only partially allayed by rea.s.surances, now and then stooping to lay her young cheek against the delicate arm in its lacy sleeve or to pa.s.s her hand lovingly up and down its outline, noting with a recurrent pa.s.sion of tenderness the transparency of the skin with its violet veining and the shadows beneath the closed eyes. Emmaline, moving on soft worsted-shod feet about the dim room, at length had whispered:

"You go tuh baid, honey. I stay with Mis' Judith till she go tuh sleep."

"Yes, go, Shirley," said her mother. "Haven't I any privileges at all?

Can't I even faint when I feel like it, without calling out the fire-brigade? You'll pamper me to death and heaven knows I don't need it."

"You won't let me telephone for Doctor Southall?"

"Certainly not!"

"And you are _sure_ it was nothing but the roses?"

"Why, what else should it be?" said her mother almost peevishly. "I must really have the arbors thinned out. On heavy nights it's positively overpowering. Go along now, and we'll talk about it to-morrow. I can ring if I want anything."

In her own room Shirley undressed thoughtfully. There was between her and her mother a fine tenuous bond of sympathy and feeling as rare, perhaps, as it was lovely. She could not remember when the other had not been a semi-invalid, and her earliest childhood recollections were punctuated with the tap of the little cane. To-night's sudden indisposition had shocked and disturbed her; to faint at a rush of perfume seemed to suggest a growing weakness that was alarming.

To-morrow, she told herself, she would send Ranston with a wagon-load of the roses to the hospital at Charlottesville.

She slipped on a pink sh.e.l.l-shaded dressing-gown of slinky silk with a riot of azaleas scattered in the weave, and then, dragging a chair before the open window, drew aside the light curtain and began to brush her hair. She parted the l.u.s.trous ma.s.s with long sweeps of her white arm, forward first over one shoulder, then over the other. The silver brush smoothed the lighter ashen ripples that netted and fretted into a fine amber lace, till they lay, a rich warm mahogany like red earth. The coppery whorls eddied and merged themselves, showing under-glints of russet and dun-gold, curling and clasping in flame-tinted furrows like a living field of gold under a silver harrow. Outside the window the stars lay on the lapis-lazuli sky like white flower-petals on still deep water, and in the pasture across the hedges she could see the form of Selim, her chestnut hunter, standing ghostly, like an equine sentinel.

When that shimmering glory lay in two thick braids against her shoulders, Shirley rose with a sigh and went to her writing-desk, where lay her diary. But she was in no mood to write, and she turned from it, frowning a little, with the reflection that she had not written in it since the night of the cape jessamines.

All at once her gaze fell upon the floor, and she shrank backward from a twisting thread-like thing whose bright saffron-yellow glowed sharply against the dark carpet. She saw in an instant, however, that it was nothing more dangerous than a fragment of love-vine from the garden, which had clung to her skirt. She picked up the tiny ma.s.s of tendrils and with a slow smile tossed it over her right shoulder through the window. "If it takes root," she said aloud, "my sweetheart loves me."

She leaned from the sill to peer down into the misty garden, but could not follow its fall.

Long ago her visitor would have reached Damory Court. She had a vision of him wandering, candle in hand, through the empty echoing rooms, looking at the voiceless portraits on the walls, thinking perhaps of his father, of the fatal duel of which he had never known. She liked the way he had spoken of his father!

Or, maybe he was sitting in the lonely library, with some volume from its shelves on his knees. She pictured Uncle Jefferson fetching his pipe and jar of tobacco and striking the match on his broad foot to light it.

She remembered one of the old darky's sayings: "Er man ain' nachally no angel, but 'thouten terbacker, Ah reck'n he be pizen-ugly ernuf ter giv de Bad Man de toof-ache!" In that instant when her cheek had touched his rough tweed jacket, she had been sensible of that woodsy pipy fragrance.

A vivid flush swept up her face and with a sudden gesture she caught her open palms to her cheek. With what a daring softness his eyes had hazed as they looked down at her under his crisp waving hair. Why was the memory of that look so sharply sweet?

As she leaned, out of the stillness there came to her ear a mellow sound. It was the bell of the court-house in the village. She counted the strokes falling clearly or faintly as the sluggish breeze ebbed or swelled. It was eleven.

She drew back, dropped the curtain to shut out the wan glimmer, and in the darkness crept into the soft bed as if into a hiding-place.