Mistress Deborah could hardly have told why she did as she was asked. Perhaps the very strangeness of the girl made her uncomfortable in her presence; perhaps in her sour and withered heart there was yet some little soundness of pity and comprehension; or perhaps it was only that she had said her say, and was anxious to get to her friends below, and shake from her soul the dust of any possible complicity with circumstance in moulding the destinies of Darden's Audrey. Be that as it may, when she had flung her hood upon the bed and had looked at herself in the cracked glass above the dresser, she went out of the room, and closed the door somewhat softly behind her.
CHAPTER XXII
BY THE RIVERSIDE
"Yea, I am glad—I and my father and mother and Ephraim—that thee is returned to Fair View," answered Truelove. "And has thee truly no shoes of plain and sober stuffs? These be much too gaudy."
"There's a pair of black callimanco," said the storekeeper reluctantly; "but these of flowered silk would so become your feet, or this red-heeled pair with the buckles, or this of fine morocco. Did you think of me every day that I spent in Williamsburgh?"
"I prayed for thee every day," said Truelove simply,—"for thee and for the sick man who had called thee to his side. Let me see thy callimanco shoes. Thee knows that I may not wear these others."
The storekeeper brought the plainest footgear that his stock afforded. "They are of a very small size,—perhaps too small. Had you not better try them ere you buy? I could get a larger pair from Mr. Carter's store."
Truelove seated herself upon a convenient stool, and lifted her gray skirt an inch above a slender ankle. "Perchance they may not be too small," she said, and in despite of her training and the whiteness of her soul two dimples made their appearance above the corners of her pretty mouth. MacLean knelt to remove the worn shoe, but found in the shoestrings an obstinate knot. The two had the store to themselves; for Ephraim waited for his sister at the landing, rocking in his boat on the bosom of the river, watching a flight of wild geese drawn like a snowy streamer across the dark blue sky. It was late autumn, and the forest was dressed in flame color.
"Thy fingers move so slowly that I fear thee is not well," said Truelove kindly. "They that have nursed men with fever do often fall ill themselves. Will thee not see a physician?"
MacLean, sanguine enough in hue, and no more gaunt of body than usual, worked languidly on. "I trust no lowland physician," he said. "In my own country, if I had need, I would send to the foot of Dun-da-gu for black Murdoch, whose fathers have been physicians to the MacLeans of Duart since the days of Galethus. The little man in this parish,—his father was a lawyer, his grandfather a merchant; he knows not what was his great-grandfather! There, the shoe is untied! If I came every day to your father's house, and if your mother gave me to drink of her elder-flower wine, and if I might sit on the sunny doorstep and watch you at your spinning, I should, I think, recover."