Her hands found his face and tore deep through the skin before he could lift his wide-flung arms to protect it. And then, almost before he realized what had happened, she stood back, groping blindly away from him until her hands found a birch sapling. She clung to it with a desperately tight clasp as if to hold herself erect. A little spot of red flecked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at her throat as she struggled for breath.
“There––there!” she gasped at him voicelessly. “There,” she whispered through her white lips, “now will you let him go?”
And Denny Bolton had stood that afternoon in wondering silence, gazing back into her twitching, distorted face without a word while the blood oozed from the deep cuts in his cheeks and dripped noisily upon the dry leaves. Once he turned and followed with his eyes the mad flight of the rabbit through the underbrush; and then turned slowly back to her.
“Why, he’s gone already,” he stated with a gentle gravity that was almost ponderous. And with a deliberation which he meant more to comfort than to conciliate: “I––I aimed to let him go, myself, right from the first time you asked me––after a while!”
She cried over him that afternoon––cried not as he had known other girls to cry, but with long noiseless gasps that shook her thin shoulders terribly. Her eyes swam with great drops that hung from her lashes and went rolling silently down her small face while she washed out the cuts with one sleeve ruthlessly wrenched from her blouse and soaked in the brook nearby.
But in almost the same breath while she crooned pityingly over him she bade him––commanded him with a swift, fierce passionate vehemence––to tell her that it did not hurt––did not hurt very much! And before she would let him go that day she made him promise to come back––she promised herself to set a light in the front window of the shabby little cottage to tell him that she had found the plaster––that there was enough left to close the cuts.
There had never been any spoken agreement between them, but since that night, three years ago, Denny Bolton had learned to watch each week end, just at dusk, for the signal to appear. From the first their very loneliness had drawn them together––a childish, starved desire for companionship; and 30 as time passed they only clung the closer, each to the other, as jealously fearful as a marooned man and woman might have been of any harm which might come to the one and leave the other utterly, desolately alone.
Winter and summer Denny Bolton went every Saturday night, close to nightfall, and waited for her to come, except that now, in the last few weeks since the first rumor of the Judge’s big barn-raising and masquerade had gone forth, no matter how early he started or how much haste he made, he always found Dryad Anderson there before him. For weeks no other topic had passed the girl’s lips, and with each recurring visit to the small clearing hidden back in the thicket near the brook the boy’s wonder grew.
Almost from the first day she had decided upon the costume which she would wear. Night after night she sat and made plans in a tumultuous, bubbling flood of anticipation which he could scarcely follow, for it was only after long argument that he had sheepishly surrendered and agreed to “dress up” at all; she sat with a picture torn from an old magazine across her knees––a color-plate of a dancing girl which she meant to copy for herself––poring over it with shining eyes, her breath coming and going softly between childishly curved lips as she devoured every detail of its construction.