“Why, what’s the matter with you to-night? Where is your hat? You look as white as a ghost! Oh—have you come from our house? Is it something about grandmother?”
“No, it’s nothing about her. I haven’t been nearer your place than this. I only stepped in here so as to avoid the wagon. I didn’t want them to see me like this.”
“But why should you be like this? Now, Seth, I know something has happened. What is it? Am I wanted? Can I do anything?”
“Let me walk with you to your house,” he said, and they turned together down the path. “Something has happened. I don’t know that I can tell you what it is, but only to be with you like this rests and comforts me.”
He was walking in the shadow; the strong light, which only tipped his shoulder occasionally, enveloped her. He watched her furtively as they moved along, and, just in proportion as he found relief and solace in the contemplation of her clear, frank, serene face, he shrank from confiding his own weak woes to her. But, as he said, it was a comfort to be with her.
They had walked almost to within sight of the Warren farmhouse before he broke the silence. She had scarcely looked at him since they started, but kept her gray eyes straight ahead, as if viewing some fixed, distant object. Her lips were tightly pressed together—the only sign of emotion on her face—and this proof that she was hard at work thinking tended further to embarrass him.
“I truly don’t know how to tell you, Annie,” he said at last. “But Albert and I have—have had words together; in fact—we’ve quarrelled.”
Her lips quivered a little. She did not turn her face toward him, but said, nervously: “I have been expecting that.”
Seth did not ask himself the cause of his cousin’s anticipatory confidence, but went on gloomily: “Well, it has come. We had it out, this evening, to the very last word. And then, as if that were not enough, the devil himself got hold of me afterward, and tugged and tore at me to—but I can’t tell you that. I can scarcely realize myself what I’ve been through this night. Why, I’ve been wandering about here on the hill-side for hours, not knowing where I was going, or even what I was thinking of, like a mad man. You can see how my hands are scratched, and my clothes torn; that is from the berry-bushes, I suppose, up by mother’s grave. I remember being there. I didn’t even know that my head was bare, until just before the wagon came up.” Before this remarkable recital of insane things, Annie was properly silent.
Seth added, after a pause, “But it is all over now. And I can’t tell you, you can’t begin to guess, how it brings me to my senses, and soothes and restores me to have met you like this.”