Not until we had left the house well behind did the girl’s face relax its tense lines. I was watching her more closely than I had realized, for when we had gone a little way along the road she turned to me almost petulantly. “Please don’t stare so at me,” she said, to my sudden confusion. “I know the hat is dreadful. Green always makes me look ghastly.”
“Perhaps it was the green.” I was unaccountably relieved. “Do you know, a few minutes ago, you looked almost pallid to me!”
She glanced at me quickly, but I was gazing ahead. We were out of sight of the house, now, and with every step away from it the girl was obviously relieved. Whatever she held in her hand, she never glanced at it. But she was conscious of it every second. She seemed to come to a decision about it while we were still in sight of the gate, for she murmured something and turned back alone, going swiftly, her feet stirring up small puffs of dust at every step. She fastened something to the gate-post,—I could see the nervous haste with which she worked. When she joined me again it was without explanation. But the clenched fingers were free now, and while she looked tired and worn, the strain had visibly relaxed.
We walked along slowly in the general direction of the suburban trolley line. Once a man with an empty wagon offered us a lift, but after a glance at the springless vehicle I declined.
“The ends of the bone think they are castanets as it is,” I explained. “But the lady—”
The young lady, however, declined and we went on together. Once, when the trolley line was in sight, she got a pebble in her low shoe, and we sat down under a tree until she found the cause of the trouble.
“I—I don’t know what I should have done without you,” I blundered. “Moral support and—and all that. Do you know, my first conscious thought after the wreck was of relief that you had not been hurt?”
She was sitting beside me, where a big chestnut tree shaded the road, and I surprised a look of misery on her face that certainly my words had not been meant to produce.
“And my first thought,” she said slowly, “was regret that I—that I hadn’t been obliterated, blown out like a candle. Please don’t look like that! I am only talking.”
But her lips were trembling, and because the little shams of society are forgotten at times like this, I leaned over and patted her hand lightly, where it rested on the grass beside me.