“You’re very good,” said Valiant, as she turned away, “and I’ll be enormously obliged. Oh—and if you see a white dog, don’t be frightened if he tries to follow you. He’s perfectly kind.”
She looked back momentarily.
“He—he always follows people he likes, you see—”
“Thank you,” she said. The tone had now a hint—small, yet perceptible—of aloofness. “I’m not in the least afraid of dogs.” And with a little nod, she swung briskly on up the Red Road.
John Valiant stood staring after her till she had passed from view around a curve. “Oh, glory!” he muttered. “To begin by shaking your fist at her and end by making her wonder if you aren’t trying to be fresh! You poor, profane, floundering dolt!”
After a time he discarded his “jumper” and contrived a make-shift toilet. “What a type!” he said to himself. “Corn-flower eyes and a blowse of coppery hair.” A fragment of verse ran through his mind:
“Tawny-flecked, russet-brown, in a tangle of gold,
The billowy sweep of her flame-washed hair,
Like amber lace, laid fold on fold,
Or beaten metal beyond compare.”
“Delicacy and strength!” he muttered, as he climbed again to the leather seat. “The steel blade in the silk scabbard. With that face in repose she might have been a maid of honor of the Stuarts’ time! Yet when she laughed—”
The girl walked on up the highway with a lilting stride, now and then laughing to herself, or running a few steps, occasionally stopping by some hedge to pull a leaf which she rubbed against her cheek, smelling its keen new scent, or stopping to gaze out across the orange-green belts of sunny wind-dimpled fields, one hand pushing back her mutinous hair from her brow, the other shielding her eyes. When she had passed beyond the ken of the stranded motor, she began to sing a snatch of a cabin song, her vivid red lips framing themselves about the absurd words with a humorous exaggeration of the soft darky pronunciation. Beneath its fun her voice held a haunting dreamy quality, as she sang, sometimes in the blaze of sun, sometimes with leaf-shadows above her through which the light spurted down in green-gilt splashes. Once she stopped suddenly, and crouching down by a thorn-hedge, whistled—a low mellow tentative pipe—and in a moment a brown-flecked covey of baby partridges rushed out of the grass to dart instantly back again. She laughed, and springing up, threw back her head and began a bird song, her slender throat pulsing to the shake and reedy trill. It was marvelously done, from the clear, long opening note to the soaring rapture that seemed to bubble and break all at once into its final crescendo.