CHAPTER XXIII
THE PERCEPTIONS OF MINGA
The "explosive dust" of the Trout County court-room had not yet subsided. Two young heads had not yet bowed before the final judgments of the law. After a week of mysterious communings, sudden hidings of and exchanges of letters, a series of hidden glances and specially planned conferences, Dunstan and Minga announced at the breakfast table one morning that they would take the green car and be gone all day. They carefully did not state where they were going and no one dreamed the dramatic character of their plans.
The rest of the family received the news without comment, the Judge merely remarking:
"Wash the car before you use it, and pay for your own gas."
Dunstan received these orders with benevolent understanding. "Well said," he approved his father impudently; with lifted eyebrows he grimaced at Sard.
"We miss our good friend Colter," he murmured. "There was a fine literary washer of cars. I mind me of the splendid hexameters that rolled from the amnesian lips while he applied himself to the mud-guards." The dancing eyes questioned his sister's face. The Judge's watchful look went also to this face, but there was no book for the world to read.
At whatever cost to her own hunger for sympathy the girl, sitting at the coffee urn, in Miss Aurelia's temporary absence, had the absorbed air of the knight who prays beside armor. For Sard was devising pathetic, youthful armors of self-control and wisdom. Her world could not share her belief nor be with her in her ardent things, therefore she would keep these ardent things bright and enshrined in her own lonely heart.
Colter had said, "I will come back." Sard, her being thrilling at the words, had dared to whisper, "Promise—promise!" She was so ashamed, so thankful for that daring now! Want him? The silent girl there dared not tell herself how she wanted him, could not put even into secret words the tremulous ecstasy of this wanting. Outside of her, curious faces like Dunstan's and Minga's and Miss Aurelia's and the Judge's looked at her own absorbed face and disapproved or were tolerant. It was nothing. Sard saw them as a person standing in a soft firelit, flower-bright room sees faces passing in profile on a cold street.
Dunstan's comment was made sotto voce, from the Arabian nights: