“What do you mean?”
“What I say,” Bess answered impudently. And vaulting sideways on the table, she sat swinging her feet, and eyeing the other with a triumphant smile.
“Unless what?”
“Unless you like to stay here until it is dark,—ay, dark, my pretty peacock; and that won’t be for an hour or more. Then you may go to him safely. Not before! But you fine ladies,” with a look that took in Henrietta, from her high-piled hair and flushed face to the hem of her skirt, “are afraid of your shadows, I’m told.”
“I am not afraid of my shadow,” Henrietta answered.
“You’re afraid of the dark, or why didn’t you come when he asked you? And when you could have helped him? Why did you not come then and say what you chose to him?”
“I did come,” Henrietta answered coldly. “It was he who failed to meet me.”
“That’s a nice flim-flam!” Bess rejoined, with incredulity. “You’re not one to venture yourself out after moonrise, I’ll be bound. And so I told him! But any way,” sliding to her feet, and speaking with decision, “he’s not here, and you can’t see him! And to tell the truth, I’d as lief have your room as your company, that being so.”
She turned to the door as if to open it. But Henrietta did not move. She was deep in thought. The sneering words, the dark handsome face, filled her with distrust; and with something like loathing of herself when she reflected that the man she sought had been this girl’s lover. But they also aroused her spirit. They spurred her to the step which the other dared her to take. Was she to show herself as a timid thing, as poor a creature as this gipsy girl deemed her? She had come hither with her heart set upon a prize; was she to relinquish that prize because its pursuit demanded an ordinary amount of courage—such courage as this village girl possessed and made naught of?
And yet—and yet she hesitated. She was not afraid of the girl; she was not afraid—she told herself—of the man who had once professed to be her lover: but there might be others, and it would be dark. If the boy were there, there would be others. And she was not sure that she was—not afraid. For the old man by the fireside, with his squalid clothes and his horrible greediness, made her flesh creep. She hesitated, until Bess, with a sneer, bade her to go if she was going.