"What's the matter?" he asked without special thought.
"It haint ... it isn't anything ... leastwise it isn't anything that I can tell you about, doctor Mac. I ... I just don't like for him to go up there."
A feeling closely akin to jealousy stirred Donald's heart. Did that uncouth young mountaineer really mean something to her after all?
CHAPTER XIII
GATHERING CLOUDS
Despite Smiles' ingenuous proffer of a sister's affection, Donald was troubled with an unreasonable dissatisfaction over the course which the events of the morning had taken, and he knew that it was unreasonable, which made it worse. Now he suddenly announced that he guessed he would not wait until the afternoon before going down to Fayville to get his small amount of baggage.
The girl was troubled, also, without knowing just why, and she watched his departure with an unhappy feeling that somehow the changes which the year had made in both their lives had raised a misty barrier between them—intangible, but not easily to be swept away. Furthermore, young as she was, she intuitively sensed that hers was the necessity of reconstructing their friendship on a new foundation, because she was a woman. The man could not do it.
Meanwhile Donald performed his downward journey with none of the lightness of heart which makes a long walk a pleasure, rather than a task. Going down the wooded descent, where the dew still lay wet beneath the heaviest thickets, was not so bad; but, when he had obtained his grip and gun, and started on the back trail, his discomforts commenced. As the main street of the little village changed its character, first to a road and then a cart path through the fields, it grew deep with dust, and, although no air stirred, it seemed to rise, as water does by capillary attraction, until his clothing was saturated and his mouth and nose overlaid with a film of it. Overhead the sky burned, and from the brown fields, which stretched to the wooded base of the mountain, heat waves rose as though the dry earth were panting with visible breath. An insect chirped half-heartedly in the grass, and then left off as though the effort were too great, and a small striped snake leisurely wove a sinuous path through the dust ahead of him, and vanished with a faint hiss.