Lucy did not answer. With her back pressed against the roof arch and her hands clinched in her lap—she sat rigid, looking down. She seemed gripped in a pain that stiffened her body and made her face pinched and haggard. Under the light cotton covering her breast rose and fell. She was an embodiment of tortured indecision.
Susan urged: "Let me tell my father and he'll send Zavier away."
Lucy raised her eyes and tried to laugh. The unnatural sound fell with a metallic harshness on the silence. Her mouth quivered, and putting an unsteady hand against it, she said brokenly,
"Oh, Missy, don't torment me. I feel bad enough already."
There was a longer pause. Susan broke it in a low voice:
"Then you're going to marry him?"
"No," loudly, "no. What a question!"
She made a grab at her knitting and started feverishly to work, the needles clicking, stitches dropping, the stocking leg trembling as it hung.
"Why, he's an Indian," she cried suddenly in a high, derisive key.
"But"—the questioner had lost her moment of vision and was once again floundering between ignorance and intuition—"Why did you kiss him then?"