His face lacked all its vivid color. It was rather haggard and stern. The devils he had swept out of his heart a fortnight earlier had, since then, been violently entertained. He stepped out of the path and waited for her, his hands on his hips. But, as she rode down, she saw this look melt. The blood crept up to his cheeks, the light to his eyes. It was like a rock taking the sun. She had smiled at him with all the usual exquisite grace and simplicity. When she came beside him, she drew rein, and at the same instant he put his hand on the pony's bridle. He looked up at her dumbly, and for some reason she, too, found it impossible to speak. She could see that he was breathing fast through parted lips and that the lips were both cruel and sensitive. His hand slid back along "Nigger Baby's" neck, paused, and rested on her knee. Then, suddenly, he came a big step closer, threw both his arms, tightening with a python's strength, about her and hid his face against her knees.
"Sheila," he said thickly. He looked up with a sort of anguish into her face. "Sheila, if you are not fit to be the mother of my children, you are sure fit for any man to love."
Her soft, slim body hardened against him even before her face. They stared at each other for a minute.
"Let me get down," said Sheila.
He stepped back, not quite understanding. She dropped off the horse, dragging her flowers with her, and faced him. She did not feel small or slender. She felt as high as a hill, although she had to look up at him so far. Her anger had its head against the sky.
"Why do you talk about a man's love?" she asked him with a queer sort of patience. "I think—I hope—that you don't know anything about a man's love, oh, the way men love!" She thought with swift pain of Jim, of Sylvester; "Oh, the way they love!" And she found that, under her breath, she was sobbing, "Dickie! Dickie!" as though her heart had called.
"Will you take back your horse, please?" she said, choking over these sobs which hurt her more at the moment than he had hurt her. "I'll never ride on him again. Don't come back here. Don't try to see me any more. I suppose it—it—the way you love me—is because I was a barmaid, because you heard people speak of me as 'Hudson's Queen.'" She conquered one of the sobs. "I thought that after you'd looked into my face so hard that night and stopped yourself from—from—my lips, that you had understood." She shook her head from side to side so violently, so childishly, that the short hair lashed across her eyes. "No one ever will understand!" She ran away from him and cried under her breath, "Dickie! Dickie!"
She ran straight into the living-room and stopped in the middle of the floor. Her arms were full of the flowers she had pulled down from "Nigger Baby's" neck.
"What did you want to bring in all that truck—?" Miss Blake began, rising from the pianola, then stopped. "What's the matter with you?" she asked. "Did your young man find you? I sent him up the trail." Her red eyes sparkled.
"He insulted me!" gasped Sheila. "He dared to insult me!" She was dramatic with her helpless young rage. "He said I wasn't fit to—to be the mother of his children. And"—she laughed angrily, handling behind Cosme's back the weapon that she had been too merciful to use—"and his mother is a murderess, found guilty of murder—and of worse!"