CHAPTER XI.
Early in the morning I arose and kindled a fire and sat beside it, waiting for my master to awake. The day was still and cold, and what was unusual with us, a dark fog lay low on the land, like the skeleton of night left hanging in the air of dawn. Master turned over and I looked round at him. He did not notice me; he lay upon his back with one arm under his head, his great brown eyes wide open, a graceful curl of hair upon his classic brow. A piece of poplar kindling snapped—and he looked at me.
"Dan," he said, rising up, and propping his shoulders against the head-board, "what was it you said last night about John Marston?"
"I repeated what Miss May said; that she was going to marry him."
"Why, he hasn't been here very often."
"But that doesn't seem to have made much difference," I replied.
He smiled at me. "Love comes once and is ever present afterward," he said, half musingly. And then rousing himself he added: "I am so much pleased to know that she is beyond the artifices of that nimble wolf that the prospect of her marriage with anyone else seems almost a blessing. But I wonder what father will say. I don't know but that he may look at it very much as I do, though I don't suppose he had an inkling that Bates was striving to win her."
"And how about your mother?" I asked.
I was looking straight at him, and I thought that his face darkened. "I could never understand her liking for him," he said.
"Neither can we understand a woman's liking for any man," I ventured to suggest, and he laughed as he got out of bed. He pulled off the snow-white counterpane and wrapped it about his shoulders, and stood before me a Greek poet, ennobled with the pride of a conquered prize.