But when Spurrier had kissed Glory good-by and she had waved a smiling farewell, she turned back into her house and covered her face with her hands.
“I don’t want to believe it,” she declared. “I won’t believe it—but it looks like he’s ashamed to take me with him. Not that I blame him—only—only I’ve got to make myself over. He’s got to be proud of me!”
CHAPTER XVI
When he came back for a short stay in the hills between periods of quiet but strenuous affairs in Louisville, he brought gifts that delighted Glory and a devotion that made her forget her misgivings. She had him back, and he found the house expressing in many small ways a taste and discrimination which brought to him a flush of pleasurable surprise. Glory knew the menace that hung over Spurrier. She knew of the malevolent and elusive enmities to which her own life had so nearly become forfeit, and the old terror of the mountain woman for her man became the cross that she must carry with her. Because of her militant father’s antagonisms she had been inured from childhood to the taut moment of suspense that came with every voice raised at the gate and every knock sounding on the door.
There was an element of possible threat in each arrival. She had become, as one has need to be, under such circumstances, somewhat fatalistic as to the old dangers. Now that the fear embraced her husband as well as her father, the philosophy which she had cultivated failed her. Yet their happiness was so strong that it threw off these things and drew upon the treasury of the present.
Spurrier, who talked little of his own dangers, was far from forgetting. His suspicion of Colby strengthened, and he looked forward to the day as inevitable 215 when there must be a reckoning between them, which would not be a final reckoning unless one of them died, and for that encounter he went grimly prepared.
One thing puzzled him. Of Sim Colby he had thought as a somewhat solitary character, whose relations with his neighbors, though amicable, were yet rather detached. He had seemed to have few intimates, yet if he had led this attack, he was palpably able to muster at his back a considerable force of men for a desperate project. That meant that the infection of hatred against himself had spread from a single enmity to the number, at least, of the men who had joined in the battle, and it had been a battle in which more than one had fallen. Before, he had recognized a single enemy. Henceforth he must acknowledge plural enmities.