“I’d not expect it of him, certainly.”
“Nor I.” And Lucy sighed in spite of herself. She was not very old.
“Ha!” Miss Herron bestowed a lightning glance on her unconscious little passenger, and found it her turn to smile, but with a kind of grimness. “Indeed!” she remarked, and added, under her breath after a queer pause: “How very extraordinary!”
They drove along quietly after that for some minutes, for Miss Herron requested silence that she might compose herself the more readily after her fright. The road led them up a gentle incline, then turned sharp to the right, and a couple of hundred yards forked to lead around both sides of a hill. It was not till the horses approached this point that their driver opened her lips. She had worn, all the time that she was quieting her nerves, a look of anxiety into the midst of which would break every now and then the kindest and briefest of whimsical smiles.
“Which direction shall we take?”
Lucy started from her reverie. She, too, had said no word. “This is Steven’s Forks, isn’t it? Shall we go to the right?”
“Toward home, then?”
“Yes,” said Lucy, eagerly, “toward home. To the right, please.”
The talk brightened then. And Lucy in particular chattered away at desperate speed, exclaiming over the rolling landscape, telling her old hostess how much she had enjoyed Barham.
“That is very pleasant to hear,” replied Miss Herron, graciously enough. “I am only sorry that my indisposition last week prevented our——”