CHAPTER XLII
IN THE RAIN
Shirley stood looking out at the rain. It was falling in no steady downpour which held forth promise of ending, but with a gentle constancy that gave the hills a look of sodden discomfort and made disconsolate miry pools by the roadside. The clouds were not too thick, however, to let through a dismal gray brightness that shone on the foliage and touched with glistening lines of high-light the draggled tufts of the soaked bluegrass. Now and then, across the dripping fields, fraying skeins of mist wandered, to lie curdled in the flooded hollows where, here and there, cattle stood lowing at intervals in a mournful key.
The indoors had become impossible to her. She was sick of trying to read, sick of the endless pacings and purposeless invention of needless tasks. She wanted movement, the cobwebby mist about her knees, the wet rain in her face. She ran up-stairs and came down clad in a close scarlet jersey, with leather gaiters and a soft hat.
Emmaline saw her thus accoutered with disapproval. “Lawdy-mercy, chile!” she urged; “you ain’t goin’ out? It’s rainin’ cats en dawgs!”
“I’m neither sugar nor salt, Emmaline,” responded Shirley listlessly, dragging on her rain-coat, “and the walk will do me good.”
On the sopping lawn she glanced up at her mother’s window. Since the night of the ball her own panging self-consciousness had overlaid the fine and sensitive association between them. She had been full of a horrible feeling that her face must betray her and the cause of her loss of spirits be guessed.
Her mother had, in fact, been troubled by this, but was far from guessing the truth. A somewhat long indisposition had followed her first sight of Valiant, and she had not witnessed the tournament. She had hung upon Shirley’s description of it, however, with an excited interest that the other was later to translate in the light of her own discovery. If the thought had flitted to her that fate might hold something deeper than friendship in Shirley’s acquaintance with Valiant, it had been of the vaguest. His choice of her as Queen of Beauty had seemed a natural homage to that swift and unflinching act of hers which had saved his life. There was in her mind a more obvious explanation of Shirley’s altered demeanor. “Perhaps it’s Chilly Lusk,” she had said to herself. “Have they had a foolish quarrel, I wonder? Ah, well, in her own time she will tell me.”