"Umph!" she grunted, crouching closer to the wall, and watching him distrustfully from the extreme corner of her eye.
"Have you ever been scared so badly you couldn't yell, Aunty?" he asked, with a bland disregard of the fact that she was just then in danger of roasting herself on the hearth for the purpose of evading him. "No? That's the way you fixed me a little while back, sure enough. I was scared too badly to run, or they never would have caught me."
The only intelligible answer heard from her was: "Go 'long, you!"
He did not "go 'long." On the contrary, he wheeled about in Tillie's chair, and settled himself as if that corner was especially attractive, and he intended spending the evening in it—a suggestion that was a decided surprise to all, even to Rachel, remembering his late conservatism.
Stuart was the only one who realized that it was perhaps a method of proving by practical demonstration the truth of his statement that he was a Pariah among the class who received the more refined character with every welcome. It was a queer thing for a man to court slights, but once inside the door, his total unconcern of that which had been a galling mortification to him was a pretty fair proof of Stuart's theory. He talked Indian wars to Hardy, and Indian love-songs to Hardy's wife. He coolly turned his attention to Lieutenant Murray, with whom his acquaintance was the slightest, and from the Lieutenant to Miss Fred, who was amused and interested in what was, to her, a new phase of a "squaw man;" and her delight was none the less keen because of the ineffectual attempts in any way to suppress this very irregular specimen, whose easy familiarity was as silencing as his gruff curtness had been the day they met him first.
Beyond an occasional remark, his notice was in no way directed to Rachel—in fact, he seemed to avoid looking at her. He was much more interested in the other two ladies, who by degrees dropped into a cordiality on a par with that of Aunty Luce; and he promptly took advantage of it by inviting Miss Fred to go riding with him in the morning.
The man's impudence and really handsome face gave Fred a wicked desire to accept, and horrify the Lieutenant and Tillie; but one glance at that little matron told her it would not do.
"I have an engagement to ride to-morrow," she said rather hurriedly, "else—"
"Else I should be your cavalier," he laughed. "Ah, well, there are more days coming. I can wait."
A dead silence followed, in which Rachel caught the glance Genesee turned on Stuart—a smile so mirthless and with so much of bitter irony in it that it told her plainly as words that the farce they had sat through was understood by those two men, if no others; and, puzzled and eager to break the awkward silence, she tried to end it by stepping into the breach.