Nothing like it had ever come into her life before.
She dropped down behind the rock, but instead of tears there came steel. In it all she could only say with her lips white, a defiant poise of her splendid head, and with a flash of the eyes which came with the Conway aroused: “Oh, and I kissed him—and—and—I loved him!”
She sat on the rock again and looked at the sunset. She was too hurt now to go home—she wished to be alone.
She was a strong girl—mentally—and with a deep nature; but she was proud, and so she sat and crushed it in her pride and strength, though to do it shook her as the leaves were now being shaken by the breeze which had sprung up at sunset.
She thought she could conquer—that she had conquered—then, as the breeze died away, and the leaves hung still and limp again, her pride went with the breeze and she fell again on her knees by the big rock, fell and buried her face there in the cool moss and cried: “Oh, and I loved that thing!”
Ten minutes later she sat pale and smiling. The Conway pride had conquered, but it was a dangerous conquest, for steel and tears had mingled to make it.
In her despair she even plucked another cotton bloom from her bosom as if trying to force herself to be happy again in saying:
“One, I love—two, I love,
Three, I love, I say—”
But this only hurt her, because she remembered that when she had said it before she had had an idol which now lay shattered, as the petals of the cotton-blossom which she had plucked and thrown away.
Then the breeze sprang up again and with it, borne on it, came the click—click—click of a hammer tapping a rock. It was a small gladey valley through which a gulley ran. Boulders cropped out here and there, and haws, red and white elms, and sassafras grew and shaded it.