The dress was her favorite of all those cast-offs of Miss Valeria’s, a changeable silk, shimmering from green to gold as the plain itself did when the buffalo grass was tall on it and the wind went over. There was a froth of lace and little bright-colored ribbon bows for trimming, exactly like the tossing bells of wild hollyhock or the phlox that bloomed in millions on that plain. Oh, it was a heavenly dress to wear when you were playing Flora MacDonald rowing Prince Charlie across the lake, or Katherine Douglass barring the door against the enemies of King Jamie—barring it with her arm, which they broke as they burst through!
To-day it was to be Flora MacDonald, and the asequia—the little irrigating ditch—was to be the “practicable water” for the scene. Hilda pulled the veil into place on her hair, swung the long trailing skirts smoothly down her slim little figure and slipped across to open the shutter behind the masking lattice of woodbine stems, her lips already moving, murmuring fragments of high converse, phrases of faith, loyalty, gratitude, renunciation. Her big black eyes swam full, misty with the vision. She had stepped—as always on entering the cyclone cellar—from Texas soil into the realm of romance.
The open shutter let in the dancing light reflected from the water, and all checkered with the beautiful thatch of tender green leaves that the woodbine was sprouting. Without coming to earth at all, Hilda felt the joy of it. Leaning ardently forward, she rustled the woodbine stems, whereupon some one, stooping to drink at the spring just outside her casement, started violently, sprang half erect, whirled and stood staring directly into her face.
A fugitive! Even to Hilda the fact spoke plain. She—expecting to see, with the vision of fancy, exactly what now confronted her in the flesh—was not greatly startled. The young fellow stood looking at her, his head, with its fair hair flung up, the blue eyes full of terror. While she gazed at him, lips apart, unable to emerge from her spell of fantasy, he reached out vaguely to the dusty, big hat that lay beside him on the grass, got quite to his feet and, with a glance behind him, came up to the woodbine lattice. He laid a shaking hand upon it, peering through at her face, anxiously, doubtfully—and began with a sort of faltering haste:
“Can I—could I get—in there? Can you hide me? They’re close after me!”
“They” had been “close after” pretty much everybody in Hilda’s cyclone-cellar world for a long time now. He looked the part, and this was the one thing he could have said without jarring the dream, without so much as brushing the down from the tip of its rainbow wing. At the words, she sank back gratefully into the realm of the fabulous, and he receded from the world of reality to follow her there.
“Why, yes,—your—” she hesitated an instant. “Your Majesty,” she whispered, just above her breath.
Perhaps he was not quite sure of the word; perhaps he was too perturbed to notice such a detail.
“Quick!” he urged; “show me how to get in there.”
Something about his face challenged and puzzled her. There was a haunting resemblance about the look of his eyes. Yet all realities strove vainly for more than vague recognition now. She was in a sort of rapture as she leaned forward and whispered: