“Yes. Folk often laugh, when they should cry instead. It is not your fault that we had to shelter from the storm—yet how I loathe you for it, Hardcastle of Logie.”
She was on fire with pride, with contempt of Nita Langrish and her power to wound. And, dimly as yet, Hardcastle understood her passion. “What else was there to do but shelter?”
“Nothing; but that does not help us. It was not your fault that we came to your gate, father and I, and became your pensioners.”
“My guests,” said Hardcastle, with gruff kindliness.
“Threadbare guests, forced on you. And what can I do, with father as he is?”
“Stay on.”
Causleen remembered Nita’s words, her laughter as she went down the road; and the poison festered, as if a snake had bitten her. How could she stay on, with all the country-side passing Nita’s gossip to and fro? How could she leave, while her father lay between life and death, babbling of far Inverness and pipes that skirled about the moorland glens?
“I thank and loathe you,” she said, and left him there—muddled, not for the first time in his life, by the ways of a maid with a man.
Hardcastle watched her till she was hidden by a shower of red, fast-falling leaves. He was impatient of some feeling that the girl had roused, some stirring at the heart he had hardened against intrusion. The Wilderness had put a slight on her, as it had striven to slight Logie. She was going in fear of the open, as he went sometimes where there was nothing doing and he had leisure to remember how strong and merciless was the hornets’ nest he had roused at Garsykes.
Then suddenly he understood the bond between them. She was proud and weary. So was he.