CHAPTER IV.
She paused and looked behind her to see if the black snake still pursued her, but she had left it far behind in her headlong race, and to her dismay she perceived by the brilliant hues of the western sky that the sun had almost set.
Badly frightened as she had been at first, the sudden feeling of safety roused in her the sense of the ludicrous, and Molly laughed aloud at her forlorn plight. Her white dress was in rags and soiled with the mud of the little brooks through which she had splashed headlong, she was bare-headed, her hair all loose and disordered, and the perspiration ran in streams down her flushed face.
“What a beauty I must look!” she ejaculated, merrily. “And I wonder what disaster will befall me next. I shall have to go and ask one of those ‘sassy Laurens niggers,’ as Abe calls them, to go home with me, for I daren’t go alone. I might meet that old snake again. But they will be frightened, I am such a sight, and perhaps they will set the dogs on me.”
She sat down on the grass to rest herself before going in at the gate and to think over the sudden contretemps that had befallen her after her two weeks of irreproachable good behavior.
A feeling of remorse came to her at the thought of her step-sister who might lose so much by the misdemeanor of the girl she had trusted.
“Oh, why didn’t I bear all and hold my tongue, little virago that I am?” she exclaimed. “I knew when I came that I must take a great deal. Aunt Lucy cautioned me carefully. Suppose—suppose—old Mrs. Barry should disinherit Louise for this. She wouldn’t forgive me as long as she lived, I know, and I couldn’t forgive myself, either.”
The beautiful young face wore an expression of dismay and the young heart throbbed with pain.
“Oh, how wicked I have been! How cruel to poor Louise,” she continued, springing excitedly to her feet. “My bad temper and love of fun are always leading me into mischief. But I’ll make it up, yes, I will. I’ll go and beg the old dragoness’ pardon. Not that she didn’t deserve all I said, but for Louise’s sake.”
With rapid footsteps she made her way to the servants’ quarters, which she saw some distance in the rear of the grand mansion. With some trepidation through fear of dogs, Molly approached the commodious white-washed kitchen in the door of which sat an old negress in a homely blue linsey dress with a red handkerchief twisted turban-wise about her head and a little black pipe in her mouth.