“Was you expectin’ a letter?” he always countered.
This daily veiled tilt of wits might have gone on indefinitely had not a new development presented itself which threw an entirely different aspect upon the whole affair.
A fortnight had elapsed since Denny Bolton’s mysterious departure from the village when it happened. As usual, after the day’s duties were completed with his hurried return from the Bolton homestead, Old Jerry turned off at the crossroads to stop for a moment before the cottage squatting in its acre of desolate garden. He didn’t even straighten up in his seat that afternoon to gaze ahead of him, so certain he 246 had grown that she would be waiting for him, a hint of laughter in her eyes and the same disturbing question on her lips, and not until the fat animal between the shafts had stopped of her own accord before the straggling fence did he realize that the girl was not there. Then her absence smote him full.
It frightened him. Right from the first he was conscious of impending disaster born quite entirely of the knowledge of his own guilt. The front door of the house was open and after fruitless minutes of panicky pondering he clambered down and advanced uncertainly toward it. His shadow across the threshold heralded his reluctant coming, and Dryad turned from the half-filled box upon the table over which she had been bending and nodded to him almost before he caught sight of her.
That little, intimately brief inclination of the head was her only greeting. With hands grasping each side of the door-frame Old Jerry stood there and gazed about the room. It had never been anything but bare and empty looking––now with the few larger pieces of furniture which it had contained all stacked in one corner and the smaller articles already stored away in a half-dozen boxes, the last of which was holding the girl’s absorbed attention, it would have been barnlike had it not been so small. From where he stood Old Jerry could see through into the smaller back-room workshop. Even its shelves were 247 empty,––entirely stripped of their rows of tiny white woman-figures.
He paled as he grasped the ominous import of it; he tried to speak unconcernedly, but his voice was none too steady.
“So you’re a-house-cleanin’, be you?” he asked jauntily. “Ain’t you commencin’ a little early?”
He was uncomfortably conscious of that interrogative gleam in Dryad’s glance––that amused glimmer which he couldn’t quite fathom––when she turned her head. She was smiling, too, a little––smiling with her lips as well as with her eyes.
“No-o-o,” she stated with preoccupied lack of emphasis, as she bent again over the box. “No––I’m packing up.”
Old Jerry had known that that would be her answer. He had been certain of it. The other interpretation––the only other possible one which could be put upon the dismantled room––had been nothing more or less than a momentary and desperate grasping at a straw.