For days he nursed his wrath as he sat upon the cabin porch beneath the yellow gourds and the purple blooms of the Jack-bean, and gazed with unseeing eyes at the wide landscape before him. The sky was blue in unparalleled intensity. The great 'balds' towered against it in sharp outlines, in definite symmetry, in awful height. The forests were aflame with scarlet boughs. The balsams shed upon the air their perfumes, so pervasive, so tonic, that the lungs breathed health and all the benignities of nature. The horizon seemed to expand, and the exquisite lucidity of the atmosphere revealed vague lines of far-away mountains unknown to the limitations of less favoured days.
In the woods the acorns were dropping, dropping, all the long hours. The yellow sunshine was like a genial enthusiasm, quickening the pulses and firing the blood. The hickory trees seemed dyed in its golden suffusions, and were a lustrous contrast to the sombre pine, or the dappled maple, or the vivid crimson of the black-gum. But the future of the year was a narrowing space; the prospects it had brought were dwarfed in the fulfilment, or were like an empty clutch at the empty air. And winter was afoot; ah, yes, the tenderest things were already dead—the flowers and the hopes—and the splendid season cherished in its crimson heart a woeful premonition. And thus the winds, blowing where they listed, sounded with a melancholy cadence; and the burnished yellow sheen was an evanescent light; and the purple haze, vaguely dropping down, had its conclusive intimations in despite that it loitered.
Dorinda, with her hands folded too, sat much of the time in dreary abstraction on the step of the porch, looking down at the yellowed corn-field which she and Rick ploughed on that ecstatic June morning. How long ago it seemed! Sometimes above it, among the brown tassels, there hovered in the air a cluster of quivering points of light against the blue mountain opposite, as some colony of gossamer-winged insects disported themselves in the sunshine. And the crickets were shrilling yet in the grass. She saw nothing, and it would be hard to say what she thought. In the brilliancy of her youthful beauty—a matter of linear accuracy and delicate chiselling and harmonious colouring, for Nature had been generous to her—it might seem difficult to descry a likeness to the wrinkled and weather-beaten features of her father's lowering face, as he sat in his chair helplessly brooding upon his destroyed opportunities. But there was a suggestion of inflexibility in both: she had firm lines about her mouth that were hard in his; the unflinching clearness of her eyes was a reflection of the unflinching boldness of his. Her expression in these days was so set, so stern, so hopeless, that one might have said she looked like him. He beheld his ruined fortunes; she, her bereft heart.
Amos James, one day, as he stood on the porch, saw this look on her face. She was leaning on her folded arms in the window hard by. She had spoken to him as absently and with as mechanical courtesy as the old moonshiner at the other end of the porch. He came up close to her. It was a wonderful contrast to the face she had worn when they talked, that day at the spring, of Rick Tyler's escape. With the quickened intuition of a lover's heart he divined the connection.
'Ye hain't kep' yer promise, D'rindy,' he said in a low tone.
'What promise?' she demanded, rousing herself and knitting her brows as she looked at him.
'Ye 'lowed ye'd let me know ef ever ye kem ter think less o' Rick Tyler.'
Her eyes, definitely angry, flashed upon him.
'Ye shan't profit by it,' she declared.
And so he left her, still leaning in the vine-framed window, the lilac blossoms of the Jack-bean drooping until they touched her black hair.