“A dawg don’t know no better.”
“Some dogs are very wise,” he assured her. “And some men very foolish.”
“The dawg,” she went on still unplacated, “got right down on his stomach and asked my pardon. I 98 hed ter fergive him, when he humbled hisself like that.”
“I’m willing,” John Spurrier amiably assured her, “to get right down on my stomach, too.”
Then she laughed, and though she sought to retreat again into her aloofness, the spell was broken.
“Am I forgiven?” he demanded, and she shook her head doubtfully though no longer with conviction.
“No,” she told him; then she added with a startlingly exact mimicry of her father’s most legalistic manner: “No. The co’te will take the case under advisement an’ defer jedgment.”
“I forgot,” he said, “that you are a lawyer’s daughter. What were you looking at across there—so fascinatedly?”
“Them hills,” she enlightened succinctly.
Spurrier studied her. Her deep eyes had held a glow of almost prayerful enchantment for which her laconic words seemed inadequate.