“Is mother in one of you?” she asked. “Oh, mother, why were you taken from your two little girls? and if the dead are immortal, can they forget us of earth? Can they be indifferent to our fate? How could they be happy if they knew—” She stopped and looking up, picked out a single star that shone brighter than the others, clinging so close to the top of Sunset Rock as to appear a setting to his crown.
“I will imagine she is there”—she whispered—“in that world—O mother—mother—will you—cannot you help me?”
She was weeping and had to bathe her face again. Then another impulse seized her—an impulse of childhood. Pulling off her stockings, she dipped her feet in the cool water and splashed them around in sheer delight.
The moonbeams falling on them under the water turned the pink into white, and she smiled to see how like the pictures of Diana her ankles looked.
She had forgotten that the old spring was near the public road and that the rail fence was old and fallen. Her revery was interrupted by a bantering, half drunken, jolly laugh:
“Well, I must say I never saw anything quite so pretty!”
She sprang up in shame. Leaning on the old fence, she saw Harry Travis, a roguish smile on his face. She thought she would run, then she remembered her bare feet and she sat down on the grass, covering her ankles with her skirt. At first she wanted to cry, then she grew indignant as he came tipsily toward her and sat down by her side.
She was used to the smell of whiskey on the breath. Its slightest odor she knew instantly. To her it was the smell of death.
“Got to the Gov'nor's private bottle to-night,” he said familiarly, “and took a couple of cocktails. Going over to see Nellie, but couldn't resist such beauties as”—he pointed to her feet.
“It was mean of you to slip upon me as you did,” she said. Then she turned the scorn of her eyes on him and coolly looked him over, the weak face, the boyish, half funny smile, the cynical eyes,—trying to be a man of the world and too weak to know what it all meant.