The vines about the veranda made a dark screen back of Zelda, shutting out the faint starlight and the lights of the house. She sat in a low chair with her hands clasping its rough arms, and it was well that her eyes could not be seen, for there had come into them a look of sorrow and weariness and fear that is best not seen in the eyes of a girl.
Morris was not wholly dull or stupid. Olive, sitting up stairs with a book which she was not reading, would have thought well of him, if she had heard. He rattled on amiably about the future of the Dramatic Club, in which he was not the least interested.
“Next winter we must be sure to try a vaudeville show. It will be a lot easier than the opera. People who are as solemn as owls are usually delighted to black up and do specialty acts. I believe I’d do a black face myself—to renew my youth.”
Zelda’s slim hands had dropped from the arms of the chair; and her spirit was at ease again. Perhaps Morris understood! Her gratitude went out to him bountifully.
“It’s absurd—talking of amateur theatricals in the dead of summer; but my family aren’t Quakers; so I don’t practise silence!” Morris rose hastily and seized his hat and gloves.
“You needn’t have mentioned it; I had noticed it!” she said; then she laughed happily, and went quickly into the house.
CHAPTER XXVI
AN AUGUST NIGHT ADVENTURE
Captain Pollock had gone into town to mail a report to his chief, and he rode homeward through the starry August night in a tranquil frame of mind. It made not the slightest difference to Frank Pollock, U.S.A., that the powers were dilatory in beginning work on the new post; and an elaborate correspondence with headquarters which might, under ordinary circumstances, have proved vexatious, did not trouble him in the least. He was hardly likely to be transferred under the existing circumstances, and if there was anything that pleased him just now it was the privilege of remaining unmolested at his farm-house headquarters. For it was the easiest matter in the world to ride over to the Dameron farm, where Zelda was always very kind to him and where Olive Merriam called him openly an assassin and charged him with responsibility for all the evils of the military establishment, about which, to be sure, she knew very little.
As he neared the farm-house he saw that its lights were not yet extinguished, but showed cozily through the trees.
“I wish I had a little nerve,” he reflected. “If I had I should not linger outside the wicket.” He let his horse walk by the gate as the lights teased his eyes, glowing plainly for a moment and then disappearing; and he hummed to himself: