Alethea looked once more toward it, hearing again the far-off lowing. A sudden movement attracted her eye. Against the great hollow whitened tree a man was leaning, whittling a stick with a clasp-knife, and now and then furtively eying her.
For a moment she did not move a muscle. The color surged into her face, and receded, leaving it paler than before. A belated humming-bird, its breast a glistening green, beat the air with its multiplied suggestions of gauzy wings close to her golden head, and was gone like a flash. The children babbled on. Tige was afraid of a stick which L’onidas had brought to keep off the calf while the cow was milked, and he yelped before he was struck, without prejudice to yelping afterward.
The man presently drew himself erect, closed his knife with a snap, and walked up slowly toward the fence.
“Howdy?” he said, as he came.
She leaned one elbow on the rails, and with the other hand she held the empty piggin. She only nodded in return.
He had an embarrassed, deprecatory manner. He was tall and lank, and clumsy of gait. He had an indifferent, good-natured expression, incongruous with the gleam of anxiety in his eye. His face was almost covered by a long, straggling brown beard.
“What made ye run off so t’other night down yander ter Boke’s Spring? I hed a word ter say ter ye.”
“I war sorry I seen ye.”
He fixed a keen look upon her.
“What fur?”