Jo had tried to force the dog from her; had scolded him sharply, but he would not stir.
His silent protest had angered Donelle, and she remembered it now, walking on the road. She felt her tears rising.
It was a day of calm and witchery. Never had the trees been more splendid, never the river more changing and beautiful. And the quiet, was there in all the world so sacred and safe a place as this?
And just then, toward Donelle, came a staggering, wretched figure. The girl stopped short and the man, seeing her, stopped also, not twenty feet away.
"It's Tom Gavot's terrible father," thought Donelle. She had never been so close to anything so loathesome before. She was not really frightened, the day made things safe enough, but she estimated the best chances of getting by the ugly thing and escaping from it.
Gavot knew her. All Point of Pines knew her and snapped their hateful remarks about her at Dan's Place. They were like a pack that had been defeated. Even Father Mantelle had the feeling that he had been incapable of coping with a situation that should not exist. It was putting a premium on immorality.
"Ha!" Pierre Gavot reeled and laughed aloud. When he was in the first stages of drunkenness he was diabolically keen. His senses always put up a revolt before they surrendered.
"So!" he called in his thick voice and with that debauched gallantry that marked him, "So! it is Mam'selle's bastard dressed and ready to skip out as her damned father did before her, leaving the Mam'selle to make the most of the broken bits. Curse ye, for what ye are!"
The veins swelled in Gavot's face, a confused, bestial desire for revenge on somebody, somehow, possessed him.
"Ye've taken all she had to give, as your father did before ye, blast him! And now, like him, ye kick her out of your way. Her, who spent herself."