“I know he won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Oh, I just feel sure. He’d never dare come back.”
“If he did would I belong to him?”
“Would a lamb belong to a sheep-killing dog that mangled it?”
“That’s so. Thank you, Papa.” And she was gone.
A boy on a horse brought her a note that afternoon. She told no one its contents and when Patty asked who sent it, Immy did not answer. RoBards was sure it came from Ernest Chirnside, for the youth never appeared. But RoBards felt no right to ask.
Somehow he felt that there was no place for him as a father in Immy’s after-conduct. She returned to her wildness, like a deer that has broken back to the woods and will not be coaxed in again.
How could he blame her? What solemn monition could he parrot to a soul that had had such an experience with honesty, such a contact with virtue?
Young Chirnside never came to the house. But he was the only youth in the countryside, it seemed, that kept away. Patty tried to curb Immy’s frantic hilarities, but she had such insolence for her pains that she was stricken helpless.