“Nay, Gillian, I never meant to be unkind to you!” murmured William Pabodie, half unconsciously taking the hand whose finger-tips grazed his palm, and at the least invitation nestled so confidingly into it.
“Gillian,” said a clear, cool voice just beside the pair. “I am sent to call you both to a game,—a game for all of us to play together.”
And Betty Alden, whose light footfall had not been heard through the sound of the falling waters, quietly looked into William Pabodie’s face, superbly glanced over Gillian’s, let her eyes rest for a moment upon the branch of lilac which Gillian had seized, although Pabodie all unconsciously still held it, and then, with one of those smiles upon her lips which most women remember to have smiled, and most men shiver in remembering to have seen, she turned and climbed the little path to the mill door.
“And now you’ll never speak to me again, lest Betty Alden should chide,” cried Gillian, turning sharply aside, and with a gesture of inimitable grace resting her folded arms against a tree-trunk, and laying her forehead upon them, while a storm of unfeigned sobs and tears shook the very tree she leaned on. William Pabodie, flinging the lilac branch to the ground, would have passed her by, but she made no movement to detain him, and so he lingered, looked at her in sore perplexity for a moment, then said in a voice of contemptuous kindness,—
“It distresses me to see you so, Gillian, and in very truth there’s no call for it; I’m not your lover, and that you know”—
“Oh, yes, I know it, I know it! Poor me, there’s none to love me, and those I could love to the death care less for me than for another’s frown.”
“Nay, mistress, I’m one that fears no woman’s frown, nor change my friends to suit any fancy but mine own.”
“But alas, Gillian’s not one of those friends!”
“Why, yes you are, Gillian, yes you are as much my friend as—as ever.”