"Why do you ask?" he asked sharply.
"He did not feel the way you did about us out there on the hill."
"How do you know?" He watched her keenly, but her face told him nothing.
"I saw it in his eyes," she said quietly, and without more words went into the house and up to her room.
Dawn stood at the little window of her room and watched the two men go down the path from the door. Through the small panes her eyes followed them until they were out of sight, and her heart swelled with thoughts strange and new and fearful. How could she go and live with this man who had frowned at her innocent happiness? Would he not be worse than the woman who had taken her dear mother's place? And how could he be so cruel as to look at her in that way? It was the look she remembered on her father's face the day he sent her mother away. It was the cruelty of men. Perhaps they could not help it. Perhaps God made them so. But that other one had been different. He had understood and smiled. Her heart leaped out toward him as she remembered his look.
Was it because he was young, she wondered, that he had understood? He had seemed far younger than his companion, yet there had been something fine and manly in his face, in the broadness of his shoulders, and the set of his head, as he walked down the path, away from the house. Perhaps when he was older he would grow that way to, and not understand any more.
She sighed and dropped her face against the glass, and, now that they were out of sight, the haughty look melted into tears.
CHAPTER V
The day that Dawn left school to go back to her home was one long agony to her.
All the other girls were happy in the thought of home-going, some of them looking forward to returning for another year, others to entering into a bright girlhood filled with gaieties. But to Dawn it meant going into the gray of a looming fate where never again would she be happy, never again free.