“I am awake now, in any case,” he replied, and laughed a little with a foolish sort of satisfaction as he looked down at Lois. For the tense look of the night before had left her eyes, and she had again the face of his old comrade at Everscombe.
“Your poor arm will sleep next, Hugh. I am leaning too heavily against it.”
“I had not felt it,—if you are content.”
Lois smiled slightly and tremulously, then, slipping out one hand, drew her fingers through the wet grass. “There has been a heavy dew,” she said irrelevantly, “and it has soaked my shoes,—my shoe, I mean.” She let her feet just show beneath her petticoat, and Hugh had sight of one stout shoe and the toe of a small gray stocking.
“You’ve been tramping with one foot half bare?” he broke out.
“Nay, nay, I have been riding. I knew it not till this morning, so I did not mind. I must have left that other shoe in the closet where I hid away.”
“Tell me, Lois, how came you there at Northrope?” he asked, after an instant.
The girl’s face lost its flash of gayety. “Why, ’tis only—” she began, and, pulling some blades of grass, twisted them between her fingers without looking at him. “Last October ’twas, Aunt Delia said perchance I were best now go visit my mother’s kinsfolk in Northamptonshire. And last week they said I had best visit her again. O me, I know not why they will not have me! I do not eat so much, Hugh, and I am ready to be of service.” She pushed aside his arm and leaned forward with her head upon her knee; by the movement of her shoulders he knew that she was crying.
He realized well why she wept, and he knew, too, there was no help that he could offer; so he only bent forward, and, speaking her name gently, patted her shoulder. He heard her swallow a sob, then, with her head still bowed, she went on defiantly, “So there is nothing to tell, Hugh. A neighbor was riding to Northrope for the day, so they sent me with him and he left me at that cottage. They thought perhaps some carrier might be going to Newick, and would convey me thither; then Lieutenant Millington would find means to despatch me to Everscombe. That is all.”
Hugh bit his nails and made no reply. If his own father rejected him, how could he reproach the uncles and aunts who grudged shelter to an orphan girl? Only she was a girl and weak, and somehow they seemed worse than Alan Gwyeth. He fell back on his stock piece of comfort: “You should ha’ been a boy, Lois, and then it had all been easy.”