“Mr. Lennox has gone, of course,” she said.
“Yes.”
Then, after a brief silence, in which Rebecca pushed the pine-knots with her foot, the elder lady spoke again.
“Don't you think you may as well tell me about it, Beck, my child?” she said.
Beck looked down and shook her head with very charming gravity.
“Why should I?” she asked. “When—when you know.”
Lennox rode his mildly disposed but violently gaited steed homeward in that reposeful state of bliss known only to accepted lovers. He had plucked his flower at last; he was no longer one of the many; he was ecstatically content. Uncertainty had no charm for him, and he was by no means the first discoverer of the subtle fineness her admirers found so difficult to describe in Miss Noble. Granted that she was not a beauty, judged rigidly, still he had found in her soft, clear eye, in her color, her charming voice, even in her little gestures, something which reached him as an artist and touched him as a man.
“One cannot exactly account for other women's paling before her,” he said to himself; “but they do—and lose significance.” And then he laughed tenderly. At this moment, it was true, every other thing on earth paled and lost significance.
That the family of his host had retired made itself evident to him when he dismounted at the house. To the silence of the night was added the silence of slumber. No one was to be seen; a small cow, rendered lean by active climbing in search of sustenance, breathed peacefully near the tumble-down fence; the ubiquitous, long-legged, yellow dog, rendered trustful by long seclusion, aroused himself from his nap to greet the arrival with a series of heavy raps upon the rickety porch-floor with a solid but languid tail. Lennox stepped over him in reaching for the gourd hanging upon the post, and he did not consider it incumbent upon himself to rise.
In a little hollow at the road-side was the spring from which the household supplies of water were obtained. Finding none in the wooden bucket, Lennox took the gourd with the intention of going down to the hollow to quench his thirst.