The old man's eyes met his affectionately.
"You have—I've told you. It's the resemblance."
CHAPTER V
THE HOUSE OF THE SPANIARDS
An hour later Everett was riding out of the town on his way to Mrs. Brandon's home. About him on all sides the scene was bathed in the splendour of late afternoon sunlight. A heavy stake-and-rider fence bordered the road, and beyond it stretched the wide, sweeping cotton fields—snow white with their unpicked product. He drew in the reins, resting his horse, while he marvelled at the tall plants, almost as tall as himself, and the strange effect of the spotless cotton against the distant border of forest. Across the fields came to him the sound of voices chanting—sweet with harmony, and looking in the direction from which it came, he saw bright turbaned negro women and stalwart men moving steadily through the rows of plants, picking the cotton and dragging huge baskets after them.
Turning from the high road two miles south of the town, he rode down a narrow roadway on both sides of which giant cottonwood trees towered, and where spreading cypresses, their long branches festooned with grey moss, cast a cooling shade.
At the end of the narrow road a gateway loomed, a large massive piece of iron grill work swung between two columns of brick and cement. Beyond these columns, the fence extended, elaborately designed iron pickets bound together with a tracery of grapes and leaves, before which a hedge of Cherokee roses grew, its thorny branches accentuating the effect of security and aloofness from the world.
Everett stopped before the gate and looked beyond, into the depths of a magnolia grove which seemed a continuance of the wood he had just passed through, so filled was it with the sprawling shadows of the thick foliage and the golden spots of sifting sunlight. He was so lost in his first impressions of the place, its stillness, its old-world charm, its fairylike mystery, that he started abruptly when he saw a little girl sitting at the foot of one of the gate posts, surveying him through gently questioning eyes. Her feet were crossed under her, as she leaned comfortably against the post, and in her lap she held a large, heavy book, one finger still upon the page from which her gaze had wandered.
Everett met her eyes in silence for a moment, looking down at her thin little face, flushed from the rose glow of the setting sun, and feeling in a flash the vividness of her odd beauty. Her brow was very white and delicate and her blue-black glossy hair, parted in the middle and brushed back to where it was braided, made her seem paler than she really was, for her skin was a rich olive. Everett forgot the beautiful colouring, the almost weird thinness of her slight figure, the sweet half questioning mouth—all these were lost sight of when he had seen her eyes. They were so strange in all they represented that he was lost in admiration and wonder—for in them, although childlike still in their innocence—was tenderness, sympathy, wilfulness and humour—all of these, and more striking still, an intentness that kept changing them from grey to black and back again.
She broke the silence that Everett had forgotten about. "Are you the schoolmaster," her voice was high and fresh and liquid, "from Maine?"