But it was the slouching figure of Boyd Connoway which had attracted her attention. As I sped on I heard her asking details as to the amount of work he had done that day, how he expected to keep his wife and family through the winter, whether he had split enough kindling wood and brought in the morning’s supply of water—also (most unkindly of all) who had paid for the tobacco he was smoking.
To these inquiries, all put within the space of half-a-minute, I could not catch Connoway’s replies. Nor did I wait to hear. It was enough for me to find myself once more safe between the hedges and going as hard as my feet could carry me in the direction of the gate of Marnhoul.
No sooner was I in the kitchen with the stone floor and the freshly scoured tin and pewter vessels glinting down from the dresser, than I heard the voice of Miss Irma asking to be informed if I had come. To Agnes Anne she called me “your big brother,” and I hardly ever remember being so proud of anything as of that adjective.
Then after my sister had answered, Miss Irma came down the stairs with her quick light step, not like any I had ever heard. With a trip and a rustle she came bursting in upon us, so that all suddenly the quaint old kitchen, with its shining utensils catching the red sunshine through the low western window and the swaying ivy leaves dappling the floor of bluish-grey, was glorified by her presence.
She was younger in years than myself, but something of race, of refinement, of experience, some flavour of an adventurous past and of strange things seen and known, made her appear half-a-dozen years the senior of a country boy like me.
“Has he come?” she asked, before ever she came into the kitchen; “is he afraid?”
“Only of being in a house alone with two girls,” said Agnes Anne, “but I am most afraid of father’s blunderbuss which he has brought with him.”
“Nonsense,” said Miss Irma, determination marked in every line of her face. “We have a well-armed man on the premises. It is a house fit to stand a siege. Why, I turned away three score of them with a darning needle.”
“Not but what it is far more serious this time!” she said, a little sadly. By this time I was reassembling the scattered pieces of “King George’s” armament, while Agnes Anne, in terror of her life, was searching on the floor and along the passages for things she had not lost.
As soon as I had got over my first awe of Miss Irma, I asked her point-blank what was the danger, so that I might know what dispositions to take.