"He meant it, whoever it was! Stones don't fly up from the ground, do they? I know—I know what they say, the lazy cowards—I know, I've heerd 'em——"
She paused; a new terror came into her eyes. "Miss Rose! Miss Rose! Don't ye go thinkin' 'twas Joe throwed——"
Suddenly her head dropped upon Rosamund's shoulder, and the straining arms held her more closely. "Miss Rose, even if 'twas Joe——"
"Grace! Oh, hush! You don't know what you are saying! You must not think that—it couldn't be true!"
"Couldn't it? You never saw my baby. He came home drunk, 'struck by lightnin''—that's what they call it, so's not to lay blame on themselves. He fell on her. That's how 'twas. She was a-crawlin' over the sill to meet him—her daddy. An' he fell on her——"
"Put away those thoughts, Grace! Put away that memory! Grace—look at me! You must—not——"
"I'm lookin' at ye. That's what makes me remember. It ain't much to you, maybe, to be friends with me. But it's a heap to me, to be friends with you. Oh—" she threw her arms above her head, and her bitter cry rang out. "Oh, curse the stills! Curse 'em, curse 'em! First 'twas my baby, an' now—if anyone harms you, even so be 'twas Joe, I'll kill him!"
It was a devotion undreamed of. Their friendship had progressed insensibly. There had been long talks, when Grace's apparent simplicity had made it easy for Rosamund to open her heart, as far as in her lay; and she had been glad enough to feed the other's hunger for knowledge with tales of the things she had seen in the world, as Grace called all that lay beyond the barrier of the mountains. Yet it had been, as Grace herself had rightly said, not a very large part of life to Rosamund; all the stranger was the revelation of what their friendship meant to Grace.
It was long before she could bind Grace to secrecy; for Grace believed that safety lay in making known the dastardly attack of the afternoon. Rosamund denied that actual danger could exist, that the attacks—if such there might be—could possibly go farther; and she very well knew that if to-day's were made known it would put an end to all her plans for the winter, now progressed so far.
Yet all that night she lay awake. It was a dreadful thing to know herself suspected, distrusted, perhaps hated; why, she asked herself, could the mountaineers not read her innocence in the very fact of her remaining openly among them? They did not suspect Ogilvie; why, then, should they look upon her innocent self as a spy?