Just at that moment a shadow fell across the light, and Mammy Krenda stood in the door.
“Well—I declare!” she exclaimed, with well-feigned astonishment. “What in the worl’ air you doin’ in this kitchen?”
They both thought she was addressing Middleton, and he began to stammer a reply; but it was her young mistress whose presence there appeared to scandalize the old woman.
“Don’t you know you ain’ got no business in heah? I can’t turn my back to git nothin’, but what you come interferin’ wid my things. Go right in de house dis minute and put yo’ nice clo’es on. I air really ashamed o’ you to let a gent—a—anybody see you dat way.” She was pushing Blair out gently. “I don’ know what she air doin’ in heah,” she said to Middleton, addressing him for the first time, and with some disdain in her manner, as if she wished him to understand that he had no business there either.
As Blair passed him on her way out she said to him in a whisper, with a low laugh:
“That’s a yarn. I do nearly all the cooking since our cook went off, but she thinks it’s beneath my dignity to be caught at it.”
They did not go into the house, but walked over through the grove and sat down on the grass on the farther slope overlooking the rolling lands, with the blue spurs in the distance. There Middleton threw himself at Blair’s feet. He had made up his mind to stake all before he left. As the old mammy passed from the kitchen to the house she made a little detour and cast a glance through the grove. The glint of a white dress through the trees caught her eye, and she gave a little sniff as she went on.
An hour later, Middleton, his face as grave as it had ever been in battle, mounted his horse and rode away without returning to the house, and Blair Cary walked back through the grove alone. She turned across to the smaller house which the old mammy occupied. It was empty, and she entered and flung herself on the snowy counterpaned bed.
The old woman came in a moment later. She gave the girl a swift glance, and, turning to the window, dropped the white curtain to shut out the slanting afternoon sun.
“‘Taint no use to ’sturb yo’self, honey; he ain’ gone.” she said, sympathizingly. “He comin’ back jest so sho’ as I live.”