“Ay, but how came he to speak to you at all? That's what I want to know.”
“Then I'm sure I can't tell you,” said Arabella, with a toss of her head, not badly done. “I suppose he saw where I came from, and I dare say he'd been leaning again' our slip-rails that night he lost his pipe. Anyhow, he asked me whether I'd found one, and I said you had, and he described the one he'd lost, and I knew that must be it. So I came back and got it for him. That was all.”
Mr. Teesdale seemed just a little put out. “I wonder you didn't say anything about it at the time, my dear,” said he, in mild remonstrance.
“Me? Why, I never thought any more of it,” the young woman said, with a slightly superfluous laugh. “I—you see that was the first and last I'd seen of him,” added Arabella, as if to end the discussion; but her father had not finished his say.
“I'm glad it was the last, however—I am glad of that!” he exclaimed with unusual energy. “Why? Because, my dear, little as I saw of him, I didn't like the cut of that man's jib. No,” said Mr. Teesdale, letting his eyes travel through the window to the river-timber, and shaking his head decidedly, as he sat down in his accustomed seat; “no, I didn't like it at all; and very sorry I should have been to think a man of that stamp was coming here after our Mary Jane!”
And Missy said never a word; but neither word, look nor tone had escaped her.
Her eyes were very wide open now. Arabella went out more evenings than one, but never, it appeared, on two consecutive evenings; so the man was not living in the district. And Missy said so much the worse; he was not merely passing his time. To clinch matters, the unhappy girl began to hang out signs of sleepless nights and perpetual nervous preoccupation by day; signs which Missy alone interpreted aright.
At length, a little before Christmas, there came a night when Arabella kissed them all round and went off to her room much earlier than usual. And the fever in her eyes and lips was noted by Missy, and by Missy alone.
It was a night of stars only. The moon by which Missy had killed her one native cat, and nursed an infant opossum, had waxed and waned. The night, when Mr. Teesdale took a breath of it last thing, looked black as soot. Twenty minutes later, the farmhouse was in utter darkness; not a single ray from a single window; and so it remained for nearly two hours.
Then suddenly a light shone in the parlour for a single instant only. The outer door of the little gun-room was now opened, as noiselessly as might be, and shut again, hairbreadth by hairbreadth. The odd thing was, that this happened not once, but twice within five minutes. And each time it was a woman's figure that stood up under the stars, and then stole forth into the night.