“You can have David for aught I care,” returned Jeanie, bridling.
“Do you say so? Well then, I’ll go with him to meeting next Sabbath day.”
“You’d better wait till he asks you,” retorted Jeanie.
“Oh, he’ll ask me fast enough,” Agnes replied, nodding her head with an air of conviction.
Jeanie bit her lip but said nothing. David had asked her and she had refused. Like most girls she was in a contrary frame of mind when it came to a question of meeting a lover halfway. In her secret heart she was only too anxious to accept David’s company, but she would not have Agnes know it for the world, and though Agnes made many sly references to the pleasures to be expected upon the coming Sabbath, neither girl was particularly jubilant when she considered it, though of the two Agnes was the more pleased. She had noted Jeanie’s lofty expression, and laughed in her sleeve at the success of her little plot.
Not only one but two rather disconsolate members of the M’Clean family appeared at church the next Sabbath day. Not relenting in her determination to tease Jeanie, as well as to punish Archie for a fit of sulks he had had during the week, Agnes triumphantly had her way and led David to offer his escort. What did she care if heretofore he had seemed to have eyes and ears only for Jeanie? She would let Jeanie see that there were other girls beside herself, and it would also raise Archie’s estimation of her if he knew that she could walk off so easily with another girl’s lover, so she argued. Very adroitly she made Jeanie the main topic of conversation, so that David was entertained greatly, and the two were chatting like old friends when Jeanie and Archie passed them on the road. David was always rather silent in Jeanie’s company, and she felt a jealous pang as she noticed how ready he seemed to talk to Agnes. She gave the two a stiff little nod as she passed, and Agnes smiled to herself. “It’s all for her own good,” she thought, “and I am glad I could make her put on that top-loftical look. As for Archie, he looks sour enough, but I don’t care.” She had learned some of Polly’s saucy ways, and the toss of her head was Polly’s own. Yet when Mrs. M’Clean urged her and David to come home with her to supper, the girl was nothing loath, and indeed was mischievously curious to see how Jeanie would treat her, and to carry further her harmless little flirtation with David.
The M’Cleans had made of their clearing one of the most comfortable places thereabouts. Both father and son had a genius for the mechanic arts, so that they were well supplied with hominy blocks, hand-mills, tanning vats, looms, and such affairs, all of their own manufacture, and though rude and clumsy, these were well adapted to their needs. The house was more commodious than at first, having besides its living-room, a bedroom on the first floor and a lean-to, or kitchen. A loft overhead gave two or three sleeping rooms. The building, floored with smooth puncheons, and, being well roofed and chinked, was very comfortable. Archie’s latest achievement, a milk bucket having staves alternately red and white, Jeanie displayed with great pride, and though Agnes really thought it beautiful, she declared that it was too gaudy.
At table a discussion of the day’s services was considered proper and fit, the sermon being the chief topic of conversation. Joseph M’Clean was still a strict Presbyterian, and did not uphold the lapses from a serious deportment into which so many of the pioneers had fallen. He was bound that his own family should be “releegious and orderly on the Sabbath, no matter what his neighbors did,” and so the Sabbath evening was passed soberly in singing psalms, and in reading from the Bible, and in discussing at great length the chapters read. Archie quite warmed up to the debate, but David had little to say, putting in only a word now and then, his eyes between times upon Jeanie, who had treated him with a cold scorn all day.
It was when the two girls went up to their loft room to prepare for bed that Jeanie had her say. She, too, had been very quiet, for Agnes had lured David over to her side upon the settle, and had ignored Archie entirely.
“I think you treat Archie too badly,” said Jeanie, shaking down her dark locks of hair.