One day when there was a feeling of spring in the air, and she had gone along one of the little winding paths through the pine wood, she met him with his gun on his shoulder and his dogs at his heels.
“Why, Annie Laurie,” he cried, “are you out hunting too?”
The deep suspicion and anger she felt toward his father put some irritation into her tone as she said:
“And why are you hunting, Sam? I thought you were working in the box factory office.”
“Well, so I was. You see, I had finished school here and dad couldn’t afford to send me away. I might have gone anyway, and somehow worked my way through Rutherford Academy, but Hannah said I oughtn’t to leave mother. So I stayed—though it didn’t seem to me quite the best thing to do. But now, suddenly, dad says I’m to go away to school. At first I refused. I was afraid it would mean pinching and scrimping for all the rest of them at home. But dad said, no, things were a little easier with him now, and I’d better take the chance while I had it.”
Annie Laurie stood before him in the path staring, while Sam waited in vain for her congratulations.
“So, yesterday,” he went on in a somewhat dashed tone, “a fellow came to the factory looking for work. He said he needed it very badly—had his mother to look after. So I spoke up and said I was leaving to go into the Rutherford Academy at the spring term, and that I’d get out and let him have my place. You see, there were a number of things I wanted to do around home before I went away. And I was just crazy to get off in the hills for a day or two. That’s the way with us down here, isn’t it, Annie Laurie? We can keep under roof only about so long. Then we have to go roving for a spell.”
Annie Laurie hardly heard what he said. She could with difficulty keep from breaking out with:
“But where is the money coming from that is to send you away to the academy? Didn’t you ask your father how he came by this money so suddenly? Have you no notion of what he has done to earn this money? Can you be living a lie—just as he is?”
There swept back to her memory the words the minister had said that day in church when she had caught Sam’s eye, and had known what he was thinking.