"What differ' does it make to you?" she asked; and again the dark eyes searched him till he was fain to look away from her.
"I reckon it doesn't make any difference, if you don't want it to. But one time you were willing enough to tell me your troubles, and—"
"And I'll nev' do it nare 'nother time; never, never. And let me tell you somethin' else, Tom-Jeff Gordon: if you know what's good for you, don't you nev' come anigh me again. One time we usen to be a boy and a girl together; you're nothin' but a boy yet, but I—oh, God, Tom-Jeff—I'm a woman!"
And with that saying she snatched her bucket and was gone before he could find a word wherewith to match it.
XVII
ABSALOM, MY SON!
Three days after the episode at the barrel-spring, Tom went afield again, this time to gather plunging courage for the confession to his mother—a thing which, after so many postponements, could be put off no longer.
It was more instinct than purpose that led him to avoid the mountain. Thinking only of the crying need for solitude, he crossed the pike and the creek and rambled aimlessly for an hour or more over that farther hill ground beyond the country-house colony where he had once tried to break the Dabney spirit in a weary, bedraggled little girl with colorless lips and saucer-like eyes.