Cornelia’s face sparkling with perfect health just then peeped out of the kitchen door. She was going “after an appetite,” she declared, and skipping past Margaret was soon climbing to a point beyond and above the barn. Reuben’s heart smote him as he thought of the “dominick pullet,” and he called out to the fast vanishing figure,—“Oh, Miss Cornelia, don’t yo’ forget Molly’s salt!”
She threw back a laughing glance and ran her hand into her pocket, a motion he understood, and disappeared from view. She was passionately fond of animals and particularly of horses. Reuben often declared, “Dat chile aint afraid of nuffin on fo’ legs.” She certainly understood and loved them and was an accomplished horsewoman; but this morning her visit to the barn was a short one and, turning a sharp angle in the path, her blue dress fluttered in and out among the bushes as she wandered away upward.
Unseen by her, from a projecting rock above, a pair of eyes as blue as her dress was watching her, as she sprang from rock to rock, every motion perfect grace. Pausing, she glanced upward and saw Hernando.
“Well,” she laughed, “what brings you out so early?”
“‘Great minds run in the same channel,’ doubtless I am hunting for the same thing you are.”
“A bath in the morning dew?”
“You certainly do not need one, and I am looking for a very prosaic article, known as an ‘appetite.’”
“I’m pretty well drabbled,” she said demurely, not noticing his look of admiration. “But come, I’m not like Eletheer, Mr. Gallant, help me to a seat up there beside you.”
He was already preparing to do so and, taking off his coat, he spread it on the rock, which was still damp with dew, and they sat down together.
It was not yet seven, the busy city below them had not yet fully wakened and the air was fresh and sweet. To Hernando, the girl beside him had always been simply “Cornelia, the baby.” Like Eletheer, he too had noticed George Van Tine’s marked attentions to her but he had also noticed that they were not objectionable, and he wondered if she fully understood the seriousness of marriage. Just now she was looking intently down among the rocks and bushes and he said gently,—“‘A penny for your thoughts.’”