"And you took the other side, I reckon," he broke out, quite unreasonably. It had not as yet come to blows between him and his father's business associates, but it made him immeasurably dissatisfied to find them on social terms at Deer Trace Manor.
"Perhaps I did, and perhaps I did not," she answered, matching his tartness.
"Well, you can tell them both that I'm much obliged to them for nothing," he said, rising and going to the door with her. "They would be mighty glad to see it patched up again and me back in the Beersheba school."
"Of course they would; so would all of your friends."
"But they are not my friends. They have fooled my father, and they'll fool your grandfather, if he doesn't watch out. But they can't fool me."
He had opened the outer door for her, and she drew herself up till she could face him squarely, slate-blue eyes flashing scornfully into sullen gray.
"That is the first downright cowardly thing I have ever known you to say!" she declared. "And I wish you to know, Mr. Thomas Jefferson Gordon, that Mr. Duxbury Farley and Mr. Vincent Farley and Miss Eva Farley are my guests and my friends!" And with that for her leave-taking, she turned her back on him and went swiftly across the two lawns to the great gray house on the opposite knoll.
For the first fortnight of his mother's convalescence Tom slept badly, and his days were as the days of the accused whose sentence has been suspended; jail days, these, with chains to clank when he thought of the promise made in the gray Christmas dawn; with whips to flog him when the respite grew shorter and the time drew near when his continued stay at home must be explained to his mother.
Ardea had gone back to Carroll the Saturday before New Year's, and there was no one to talk to. But for that matter, he had cut himself out of her confidence by his assault on the Farleys. Every morning for a week after the Christmas-day clash, Scipio came over with the compliments of "Mawsteh Majah," Miss Euphrasia, and Miss Dabney, and kindly inquiries touching the progress of the invalid. But after New Year's, Tom remarked that there were only the Major and Miss Euphrasia to send compliments, and despair set in. For out of his boyhood he had brought up undiminished the longing for sympathy, or rather for a burden-bearer on whom he might unload his troubles, and Ardea had begun to promise well.
It was on a crisp morning in the second week of January when the prolonged agony of suspense drove him to the mountain. His mother was sitting up, and was rapidly recovering her strength. His father had gone back to his work in the iron plant, and his uncle was preparing to return to his charge in South Tredegar. With Uncle Silas and the nurse both gone, Tom knew that the evil hour must come speedily; and it was with some half-cowardly hope that his uncle would break the ice for him that he ran away on the crisp morning of happenings.