“Oh, I don’t think you want to go, my dear. It’s a long way off and the dew is heavy.”
“Yes, but I do,” said Nellie. She opened the coat closet, and began hunting for an old cloak.
“It’s probably nothing at all—a false alarm,” he continued; but seeing that she persisted—and she could be very persistent when she wanted to—he added: “Oh, very well; I’ll go up to the corner of the road, and if it is anything worth seeing, I’ll come back for you.”
Left alone, Nellie sat down on the steps of the front piazza and waited. Now that Emmons had gone so meekly, her conscience began to reproach her for her treatment of him throughout the evening. No wonder he disapproved of Bob. He was quite right to do so; she disapproved of him, herself. Yet, the result of a day’s effort to be, as he had asked, a little more civil had rendered him more civil in return. Even if one did disapprove of a man’s morals, one could not help noticing the extraordinary quickness with which he caught one’s ideas and anticipated one’s wishes. He never shut his eyes and repeated the same thing in exactly the same tone of voice—a trick of Emmons’s which for the first time she noticed annoyed her excessively. It was in the small things that Bob was so considerate of her feelings; and yet there was something ludicrous in talking about a man’s consideration for her feelings when he had stolen her patrimony before she had put up her hair.
At this point she began to appreciate that Emmons had had more than time not only to run, but to walk, to the corner of the road and back. She went down to the gate, and looked up the road. There was no sign of him. He had been right then. It was only a false alarm. And then to contradict this hypothesis she saw the heavens suddenly lit up with the unmistakable glare of a conflagration.
Emmons had played her false.
Nellie did not hesitate an instant. She started out by herself.
Guided first by the glare in the sky and soon by the sound of shouting, she cut across fields. Before long she came in sight of the fire. It was in the barn of a neighboring farmer. She could see the people crowding about it, and the thick rolling smoke that turned the full moon to a dull reddish brown.
Coming up from the darkness she was unnoticed. Every one was watching the flames, except those who were trying to put them out. The first person she saw was Vickers. His coat was off, and from the rather dangerous eminence of a woodpile he was playing the hose upon the roof of a neighboring stable. Among the lookers on, she observed Overton, and then the perfidious Emmons. She might be excused for a feeling of anger against her betrothed; and she was just approaching him in order to thank him for his consideration of her wishes, when her attention was distracted. Vickers, who had come down from the woodpile, was suddenly approached by a sobbing, expostulating child, the daughter of the farmer. She had evidently escaped from the parental supervision and had seized the knees of the first passer-by. Nellie saw Vickers stoop to listen, saw him lay down a bucket he had taken up, saw him hitch his trousers with a peculiarly energetic motion, and run toward the blazing building. Some one shouted to him, another caught his arm, and was shaken off. He disappeared into the blaze. An instant later he reappeared carrying a small bundle which turned out to be nothing more than a puppy.
A voice reached her ears in the pause that followed.