“I’m so busy I haven’t time to read,” he lied.
He thought afterward that in that moment when he refused to accept her kindness she divined perfectly the underlying feeling. It was his last conversation with Jean Byrne. He went home quite sadly. There was no surfeit of comforts in that home of his, to be sure, which could render him careless of helpful friendships: but, although he felt the significance of refusing her offer, knowing it meant the end of things between them, his sadness was over the seeming weakness in her that had caused his dislike. He might not have been so astonished at other women. But of Jean Byrne he had expected differently.
His life in the Lantern Marsh thus robbed of one more brightness became the more uninteresting. He felt the need of companionship. Struggling through long days, of planting, sowing, and haying, he forced back the tug of expanding desires that urged him to different pursuits. In the evenings he would stand looking down the road that led to Lockwood, wishing that he were travelling it never to return. To Lockwood, to Merlton beyond, to the world. He dreamed of a different life from his own, where people were gentle, where they knew things and would be willing to teach him out of their knowledge. But these dreams were folded to rest each night in heavy sleep and the light of each morning found them dissipated. He wanted books, but there was no library in Beulah. He had no money of his own and knew the foolishness of asking his father for it.
At the end of June, Jean Byrne returned to her home in Lockwood, and Mrs. Fitch remarked to him one day that she was not coming back, but was going to be married in the autumn to a doctor in her own town. Mrs. Fitch was curious, no doubt, to discover a reason for Mauney’s never having come back to see her again.
“Miss Byrne was a good teacher, Maun,” she said, as they talked in the Beulah post-office, “and I think she was powerful fond o’ you, boy. She told me onct as how she expected you would some day make your mark in the world.”
Mauney felt tears welling into his eyes and turned away from her without further comment. He drove home blaming himself for having been rude to Jean Byrne. Her confidence in him, expressed through Mrs. Fitch, had come as sharp reward for his ingratitude. And yet, was it his fault?
On a sultry July evening an unexpected break in the monotony of his life occurred. He was sitting alone on the front steps of the farm-house, having just come in from the fields, when his attention was attracted by a cloud of dust on the Lockwood road. A motor car was travelling rapidly along and as it drew near, slackened its speed. When it stopped directly at the foot of the orchard he surmised the people in it had paused for directions. A woman in the back seat waved to him and he quickly responded.
They were all strangers, the man at the wheel and the two women in the rear seat, although he felt there was something quite familiar about the grey-haired woman sitting nearest him.
“Is this where the Bards live?” she asked a little nervously. She was a small-bodied woman of perhaps fifty with very fine features, and clear, blue eyes that smiled pleasantly through rimless spectacles and the fawn motor veil that covered her face.
“Yes,” Mauney replied, gazing curiously at her, and then at the others.