“You mustn't speak of it that way. It spoils it.” It seemed to both as if they were swaying nearer together, a languid, mystical atmosphere thickening about them. Only there was the drawback with Sandy of an inward monitor, with a hoarse voice like Kid Sadler's, who would be talking to him in figures and proverbs.
“Keep away from china an' lace; they break an' stain; this thing has been observed. Likewise is love a bit o' moonlight, sonny, that's all, an' a tempest, an' a sucked orange. Come out o' that, Sandy, break away; for, in the words o' the prophet, 'It's no square game,' an' this here girl, God bless her! but she plays too high, an' you can't call her, Sandy, you ain't got the chips. Come away, come away.”
“And that,” Sandy concluded the council, “is pretty accurate. I'm broke this deal.”
He stood up straight and looked at Gracia with eyes drawn and narrowed.
She felt afraid and did not understand.
“You don't know me. If you knew me, you'd know I have to go.”
The wind rose in the afternoon, and blew gustily through street and garden. The windows of Miss Elizabeth's sitting-room were closed. The curtains hung in white, lifeless folds. But in Gracia's room above the windows were open, and the white curtains shook with the wind. Delicate and tremulous, they clung and moulded themselves one moment to the casement, and then broke out, straining in the wind that tossed the maple leaves and went up and away into the wild sky after the driving clouds.
Sandy turned north up the village street, walking irresolutely. It might be thirty miles to Wimberton. The squire had sent him money. He could reach the railroad and make Wimberton that night, but he did not seem to care about it.
Out of the village, he fell into the long marching stride, and the motion set his blood tingling. Presently he felt better; some burden was shaken off; he was foot-loose and free of the open road, looking to the friction of event. At the end of five miles he remembered a saying of Kid Sadler's, chuckled over it, and began humming other verses of the “Sing Song,” so called by the outcast poet.
“Oh, when I was a little boy, I laughed an then I cried,