“Nor do I,” Irene answered. “It was not a cold I feared; it was spoiling my boots. They were nearly soaked. All the science in the world couldn’t keep them dry.”
She was holding her white skirts above the tops of her boots, which looked much like the pair she had declared drenched with the dew which lay so heavy upon the grass.
“Didn’t take you long to change them,” Tom said dryly, with a look Irene understood and hated him for.
Her plan had failed, and there was nothing to do but keep with us until the grove was reached. The moon had risen higher by this time and was casting broad bars of light upon the trees and ground, and the well, which Irene spied first, and darting toward it, exclaimed:
“So, this is the charmed well where Nannie drowned herself, and into which foolish young people look, hoping to see their future mates. I wonder if I could see mine by moonlight.” And standing on the projecting stone she bent forward and looked into the well, while Rena called:
“Come away, Irene. You will certainly fall in.”
“Suppose I do, who would go in after me, I wonder,” Irene answered with a laugh, and Tom replied:
“I suppose I’d have to, but I don’t crave the job. I should get my shoes wet, too. Come away, Irene.”
She didn’t move, except to straighten herself up and turn her face toward us and up to the moonlight; and such a beautiful face it was, and such a lovely picture she made, standing over that dark water into which she might at any moment fall, for the stones were wet and slippery with the dew. “Is she crazy as Nannie must have been when she threw herself into that well?” Reginald thought. She was a distant relative of Nannie, there might be a taint of insanity in her blood, and it was his duty to interfere. Going up to her and taking her hand, he said authoritatively, rather than entreatingly:
“Come away, Miss Burdick. You make us all very nervous. Come with me.”