For two days and two nights the girl fought on alone against the outcry of her own heart, and as on a former occasion she chose again the open roads for her battlefield. While she pounded Ragtime mercilessly over the little-traveled northern highways, she struggled rebelliously with stubborn arguments which only left her more and more bewildered, the more conclusive they became. She summoned parallels by the score to her support, but she lacked the trick of facile finality, somehow, which had always marked his usage of such argument. Hard moments she knew when she closed her teeth tight upon her decision and told herself that it was final, but the next moment, after she had laid whip across the black horse's flank and faced homeward, she was biting her lips in shaken, panic contemplation of another thought which would not be denied.
There were times without number when Barbara hated the one whose very gentleness toward her was making her position hardest to maintain; times when she hated the work which, absorbing him by day at least, must be making his suffering less difficult to endure. For she understood that there was still much for him to do, although the hill-country was already ringing with his victory. And throughout every hour she hated herself most of all for that spirit behind the doubt which was swinging her, pendulum-like, between brain's reason and heart's desire.
Barbara needed her mother in those days of wretchedness, for she came and went as blind to the helpless misery which followed her always from the eyes of her father as she was heedless of who might read the misery in her own. She turned a chill, set face to the one attempt to help made by Miriam Burrell, who, at the first inkling of violence on the river and possible danger to Garry Devereau, had come rushing overnight into the hills, purposed never to leave them again unless it was with him, as the wife of the man she loved. Barbara wanted her mother, and when that occurred to Miss Sarah, the latter could no longer continue in passive sympathy. Without compunction or loss of more time, she reversed a decision at which she had arrived herself only a short time before. For Miss Sarah had stopped campaigning. Caleb, with fire in his eye, had brought her the story of how "her boy" Steve had broken Harrigan with his bare hands. She had had little to say concerning that episode, but her brother, noting that she did not condemn it as regrettable, wondered too that he had never noticed before how hard his sister's eyes could be. The news that Barbara was lost had reached Miss Sarah hours before Allison's private car brought the girl and her father and Hardwick Elliott back to Morrison. Thereupon, with her first glimpse of Barbara's wanly mute and suffering face, she had pieced the details together; she had told herself, with sorrow and understanding in her heart, that she must no longer interfere. And now, though she did summon Barbara to her, the end of the second endless day, it was with no thought for evasion or finesse. Barbara obeyed that summons reluctantly. In the face of an almost sullen light in the girl's eyes when she entered on lagging feet, the older woman knew that she could not have persisted in such an attempt, even had she planned to employ it. Additional warning was not needed, but Barbara's first words told her that the hour was long past for such methods.
At first the girl refused to sit down. She wandered aimlessly around the room, switching nervously at her booted ankles with her riding-crop, to stop suddenly and raise a pale and stormy face.
"I know why you sent for me," she exclaimed, "and I know just what you think of me. But I must tell you, Miss Sarah, that there is nothing which can alter now, the least little bit, a decision which I know is wisest and best!"
So she had the first word, never dreaming that Miss Sarah had seen to that. Nor did the latter smile or seem to proffer argument at first. Oh, Miss Sarah had the true instincts of a big soul!
"Barbara," she answered quietly, after her formal firmness had prevailed and the girl had seated herself, "Barbara, when I sent for you it was not with a belief that I might influence you, for both of us know that this is your problem alone. I merely hoped to comfort, that was all. More than once I have been guilty of trying to manage you a little, but you will forgive me, I know, when I tell you that I have loved Stephen almost all his life, as though he were my own, and hoped as long for his great happiness. On more than one occasion I contrived situations which I thought might make your choice my happiness, too. I know now that I was no better than any other meddling old woman, whose efforts are well meant but dangerous for all that. And I will meddle no more. But—but my heart aches a little, too, to-day, Barbara. May I just talk to you?"
Barbara blinked in surprise at the subdued sadness in the older woman's voice. But her lips remained sullen.
"There is nothing more to be said," she reiterated uncompromisingly. "I tell you I am sure!"
And from that statement, minutes before she had thought to hear it, Miss Sarah learned, thankfully, just how deep was the girl's uncertainty.