“Compare your watches,” advised the man, “and get her to note the time when she opens the basket. Then you can time the flight.”
Glory shook her head and laughed. “I don’t own any watch,” she reminded him. “And even if I did I misdoubt if Aunt Erie would have anything to compare it with—unless she carried her alarm clock along with her.”
“Wait a minute,” admonished the man, as he loosened the strap of his wrist watch, “I’ve two as it happens—and a clock besides. You keep this one and give Aunt Erie my other. I’ll get it for you and set it so that they’ll be together to the second.”
He wheeled then and went into the room at the back and for a few minutes, bachelor-like he rummaged and searched for the time-piece upon which he had supposed he could lay his fingers in the dark.
Yet Spurrier’s thought was not wholly and singly upon the adventure of timing the flight of a carrier pigeon. In it there lurked a sense of half-guilty uneasiness, which would have been lighter had Glory asked some question when she gazed on the picture which sat in a seeming place of honor at the center of his room. Her silence on the subject had seemed casual and unimportant, yet his intuition told him that had it been genuinely so, she would have demanded with child-like interest to be told who the woman might be with the high tilted chin and the rope of pearls on her throat. The taciturnity had sprung, he fancied, less from indifference than from a fear of questioning, and when he came quietly to the door, he stood there for a moment, then drew back where he would not be so plainly visible.
For Glory had returned to the table and stood with her eyes riveted on the framed portrait. Unconscious of being observed her face was no longer guarded of betrayal, and in the swift expressiveness of her delicate features the man read a gamut and vortex of emotion as eloquent as words. The jealousy which her pride sought to veto, the doubt which her faith strove to deny, the realization of her own self-confessed inferiority in parallel with this woman’s aristocratic poise and cynical smile, flitted in succession across the face of the mountain girl and declared themselves in her eyes.
For an instant the small hands clenched and the lips stirred and the pupils blazed with hot fires, so that the man could almost read the words that she shaped without sound: “He’s mine—he ain’t your’n—an’ I ain’t goin’ ter give him up ter ye!”
Spurrier remembered how she had declared she would almost rather see him die than surrender him to another girl.