“Sit down, Annie, dear,” she said, cordially. “I’ll be through with this in a moment.”
Her visitor took the proffered chair and smiled, while the busy machine rattled down the last seam of the skirt on which the other was busy.
Eve was very good to look upon, as she bent over her work, and her visitor was well content to wait. Her slight figure was delightfully gracious; her pretty hair, loosely dressed, looked to have all the velvet softness and lustre of spun silk. Her face was hidden, but the beautifully moulded outline of her cheek was visible. There was such a wholesome air of purpose in her attitude that it was quite easy to imagine that the shadows of the past had long since faded from her gentle eyes, that youth had again conquered, now that those gray days had lightened to the rosy summer of peace.
Something of this was passing through the man’s mind as he hungrily devoured the beauty, which for so long had held him its slave.
It was nearly two months since the happenings which had so nearly ended Jim Thorpe’s earthly career. Two months during which he had honestly struggled to regain 407 that footing he had once held in the district. And now the fall was advancing, and the hopes of winning through with the people of the place seemed as far off as ever.
Prejudice still clung. Barnriff, willing enough to accept his actual innocence on the double charges made against him, still could not forget that he had helped the real thief to escape. It mattered nothing to them that in the end the man had died a violent death. He had been helped to escape––their justice. So there was no employment of any sort in Barnriff for Jim Thorpe. And Eve, too, was only completing orders which had been placed with her weeks before.
“There,” she said, raising her needle and removing the stuff from beneath it. “I hate it, and I’m glad it’s done.”
She looked up with a smile to encounter the dark eyes of Jim Thorpe.
“You?” she cried, in a tone that should have made him glad. “Why, I thought surely it was Annie. But there, I might have known. Annie would not have sat silent so long. You see she was coming over for a gossip. But I s’pose it’s too early for her.”
Jim noticed now that something of the old happy light was in her eyes again. That joyous light which he had not seen in them for nearly a year. What a wonderful thing was youth.