"I'll settle everything with Mr. Tayloe. Kiss me 'Good-by' and be off."
"It's all right!" she called gayly from the school-house steps. "May she go? She's said it."
"If you go security for her," answered Mr. Tayloe, coming towards them, and Flea was off like an arrow out of a bow. He should not see that she had been crying.
The teacher was not altogether satisfied.
"You really made her repeat what I said she must before she could go?" he said, in settling Miss Emily in her saddle.
She pouted prettily, "I really made her say, 'A—thorn—scratched—my—face—as—I—came—through—the—woods,'" dropping the words in mock solemnity. "Now let us talk of pleasanter things than school worries."
Not one of the horseback party gave another thought to the overseer's daughter, racing through woods and over ploughed fields in an air-line for home, her heart as light as a bird, and as full of music.
"I'll never forget it to my dying day," was to her a solemn pledge of eternal friendship. To have won it was worth all she had borne that day. As she ran, she sang and smiled like the owner of a blissful secret. In the fullness of her joy she even forgot to hate Mr. Tayloe.
Her short-cut took her through a matted wilderness of shrubs and weeds, past a deserted cabin set back from the main road. A negro, driven crazy by drink, had murdered his wife and child there years before, and the hut had never been occupied since. The negroes believed it to be haunted. Not a colored man, woman, or child in the region would have ventured within a hundred yards of it after nightfall. The deserted hovel had a weird charm for Flea, and, finding herself a little tired after her run, she sat down upon the stone door-step to enjoy the sunset, and to go on with a "poem" inspired last week by the haunted house. Four lines were already composed, written and hidden away in the hair trunk where she kept her clothes at home. A nameless diffidence kept her from speaking of the fragments of stories and rhyme entombed under flannel petticoats and home-knit stockings. She said the four lines aloud while she rested. Unpruned trees grew over the grass-grown path leading to the closed door. Sumac bushes, vivid with scarlet leaves and maroon velvet cones, had sprung up close to the walls. In what was once a garden wild sunflowers bloomed rankly.
The girl's poetic soul felt the charm of a melancholy she could not define; she longed to clothe with language the feelings excited by mellow light, rich colors, and silence that yet spoke to her. She recited her rhymes in a low, deep voice: