That Christopher's eyes followed the graceful figure in its finely fitting habit Cynthia noticed with a sudden jealous pang, detecting angrily the warmth of the admiration in his gaze. The girl had met his look, she knew, for when she lifted her face to her companion it was bright with a winter's glow, though the day was warm. She spoke almost breathlessly, too, as if she had been running, and Cynthia overhearing her first low words, held her prim skirt aside, and descended awkwardly over the wheel. She stumbled in reaching the ground, and the girl with a kindly movement turned to help her. "I hope you aren't hurt," she said in crisp, clearcut tones; but the elder woman, recovering herself with an effort, passed on after an ungracious bow. When she reached Christopher he was still standing motionless beside the wagon, and at her first words he started like one awaking from a pleasant daydream. "So you came, after all," he remarked in an absent-minded manner. "Of course I came." She was conscious that she almost snapped the reply. "Did you expect me to spend the night in town?" "In town? Hardly." He laughed gaily as he helped her into the wagon; then, with the reins in his hands, he turned for a last glance at the stage. "Why, what did you think I was waiting for?" "What you are waiting for now is more to the purpose," she retorted, pressing her fingers upon her aching temples. "The afterglow is fading; come, get in."
Without a word he seated himself beside her, and as he touched the horses lightly with the whip the wagon rolled between the green tobacco fields. "How delicious the wild grape is!" exclaimed Cynthia, drawing her breath, "I hope the horses aren't tired. Have they been at the plough?" "Not since dinner time." It was clear that his mind was still abstracted, and he kept his face turned toward the pale red line that lingered on the western horizon. "This is a queer kind of life," he said presently, still looking away from her. "We are so poor and so shut in that we have no idea what people of the world are really like. That girl out there at the cross-roads, now, she was different from any one I'd ever seen. Did you hear where she came from?" "I didn't ask," Cynthia replied, compressing her lips. "I didn't like the way she stared." "Stared? At you?" "No, at you. I'm glad you didn't notice it. It was bold, to say the least." Throwing back his head, he laughed with boyish merriment; and she saw, as he turned his face toward her, that his heavy hair had fallen low across his forehead, giving him a youthful look that became him strangely. At the instant she softened in her judgment of the unknown woman at the cross-roads. "Why, she thought I was some queer beast of burden, I reckon," he returned, "some new farm animal that made her a little curious. Well, whoever she may be, she walked as if she felt herself a princess." Cynthia snorted. "Her habit fitted her like a glove," was her comment, to which she added after a pause: "As things go, it's just as well you didn't hear what she said, I reckon." "About me, do you mean?" "She came down to meet another girl," pursued Cynthia coolly. "I was getting out, so I don't suppose they noticed me—a shabby old creature with a bundle. At any rate, when she kissed the other, she whispered something I didn't hear, and then, 'I've seen that man before—look!' That was when I stumbled, and that made me catch the next 'Where?' her friend asked her quickly, and she answered…." There was a pause, in which the warm dusk was saturated with the fragrance of the grape blossoms on the fence. "She answered?" repeated Christopher slowly. Cynthia looked up and down the road, and then gave the words as if they were a groan: "In my dreams."
BOOK II . THE TEMPTATION
CHAPTER I. The Romance that Might have Been
With July there came a long rain, and in the burst of sunshine which followed it the young tobacco shot up fine and straight and tall, clothing the landscape in a rich, tropical green.
>From morning till night the men worked now in the great fields, removing the numerous "suckers" from the growing plants, and pinching off the slender tops to prevent the first beginnings of a flower, except where, at long spaces, a huge pink cluster would be allowed to blossom and come to seed.
Christopher, toiling all day alone in his own field, felt the clear summer dawn break over him, the golden noon gather to full heat, and the coming night envelop him like a purple mist. Living, as he did, so close to the earth, himself akin to the strong forces of the soil, he had grown gradually from his childhood into a rare physical expression of the large freedom of natural things.
It was an unusually hot day in mid-August—the time of the harvest moon and of the dreaded tobacco fly—that he came home at the dinner hour to find Cynthia standing, spent and pale, beside the well.
"The sun is awful, Christopher; I don't see how you bear it but it makes your hair the colour of ripe wheat."
"Oh, I don't mind the sun," he answered, laughing as he wiped the sweat from his face and stooped for a drink from the tilted bucket. "I'm too much taken up just now with fighting those confounded tobacco flies. They were as thick as thieves last night."