“Did he say anything else to you?”
Annie grew restive under this persistent interrogation. The habit of deference to the older, wiser, more beautiful woman was very strong with her, but this did seem like an undue strain upon it.
“Why yes, no doubt he did. We talked of a number of things.”
“What were they? What did he say?”
“Well, really, Isabel, I——”
The elder woman gave a little click with her teeth and, after a searching glance into the other’s face, resumed her walk up and down, her hands clenched rather than clasped before her, and her movement more feline than ever. “Well, really you—what?” she said with the faintest suggestion of a mocking snarl in the intonation.
The girl drew herself up. It was not in human nature to keep her tone from chilling. “Really, I think I would better go up to Sabrina. I fancied I might be of some service to you.”
“Annie! Are you going to speak like that to me?—now of all times!” The tone was outwardly appealing. Annie’s sense was not skilled enough to detect the vibration of menace in it.
“No, Isabel, not at all. But you make it hard for me. Can you wonder? I think to comfort a desolate, stricken woman in her hour of sorrow, and she responds by peremptory cross-examination as to what a young man may have said to me, in the moonlight. Is it strange that I am puzzled?”
“Strange! Is not everything strange around and about me! That I should have married as I did; that I, loathing farm life, should have come here to live; that I should be waiting here now for them to bring my husband’s corpse home to me—is it not all strange, unreal? The conversation ought to be to match, oughtn’t it?”—she spoke with an unnatural, tremulous vivacity which pained and frightened the girl—“and so, while we wait, I talk to you about young men, and the moonlight, and all that. Can’t you see that my mind is tearing itself to pieces, like a machine in motion with some big rod or other loose, pounding, crushing, right and left like a flail! We must talk! Tell me what he said, anything—everything.”