Again Warren's stentorian tones shattered the peace of the night. He used his first spare breath in announcing his intention to get a nearer view and see if a girl named Hephzibah Diggs could possibly be the beauty she had seemed. The announcement of this intention rendered Forbes uneasy.
"You let Hephzibah alone," he warned his friend. "These self-respecting country girls think themselves as good as anybody—they are as good as anybody. And I'm responsible to Miss Kent for your behavior."
"I don't want anything of the girl except to see her by daylight. She's not too self-respecting for that, is she?" And then seeing that Forbes was really annoyed, Warren dropped the subject of Hephzibah, though without the least alteration in his intentions.
It did not prove so easy as he had anticipated to get a satisfactory view of the girl whose face, glimpsed in the half-light of the previous evening, had seemed so alluring. At breakfast time Phemie met with no accident, and though Warren watched the swinging door that led to the kitchen with the alertness of a cat at a rat hole, it swung open and shut without revealing anything more seductive than a corner of the kitchen table. The day was warm, but the outside kitchen door remained obstinately closed, and on the rare occasions when it opened, it was Phemie who emerged.
Warren was not a man who readily surrendered. Indeed, difficulties were likely to stiffen a careless desire into adamantine resolution. When his watch showed noon and Hephzibah Diggs continued invisible, he decided it was time to take matters into his own hands. He rose from his chair on the porch stretching his sinewy length lazily. "I believe I'll walk about a bit," he said, "and work up an appetite for dinner. With meals like these, a man wants to be able to do himself full justice every time he sits down to the table."
"You ought to try Miss Kent's cooking," boasted Forbes. "She trained this girl, and she does well, but she's not a patch on her teacher."
Warren's stroll took him no farther than the kitchen door. He ascended the steps jauntily and knocked. After waiting vainly for an invitation to enter, he decided to assume that it had been spoken, and pushing the door ajar, he walked in.
Over in the corner Phemie was chopping something in a wooden bowl, but in spite of the insistent tapping of the knife upon the wood, he was hardly conscious of her existence. A girl stood at the table rolling out biscuit, and her sleeve turned back almost to the shoulders, revealed a faultless arm, white and rounded and tapering to the finger-tips. She turned her head at his step and he thrilled with amazed pleasure. His glimpse of the previous evening had not been misleading. Indeed his impression had fallen short of the actuality. He was looking at the handsomest young woman he had ever seen.
Mr. Ridgeley Warren did not lack self-confidence. His momentary silence was due to wondering admiration, not to any doubt of his power to please. With smiling self-possession he advanced into the room. In her corner Phemie chopped on steadily, without removing her fascinated eyes from his face. Hephzibah—it was preposterous that this radiant creature should be encumbered with such a name—continued to roll biscuit.