Her husband interrupted her again, as if he had not heard what she said.
"Study! She's the best scholar of her age I or you or anybody else ever saw. She has more brains than all the rest of them put together. You'll be proud of your name-child some of these days, Jean."
"How happens it then that she was kept in?" was the next and natural question. "Perhaps she is not industrious?"
"She works like a horse!" came from Dee, who had laid his head back against the wall, and sighed and turned white behind his freckles. The boy looked ill.
Mr. Grigsby was troubled.
"I have had thoughts," he said, more hesitatingly than he was accustomed to speak, "about Mr. Tayloe's management of that child. She's high-strung and sensitive, and so little like most girls of her age, that an ordinary teacher would not know how to get on with her. But she learns so fast under him, and is so eager about her lessons, that it doesn't seem wise for me—"
A piercing yell from without broke the sentence in the middle. Another and another, with never a breath between, drew the whole party to the back door, from which direction the screams had come.
The moonlight showed the cart and mule at the door of the kitchen, which was built twenty yards or so from the house. The moon also showed Chaney jumping up and down like a crazy thing at the back of the cart, and screeching at the top of her lungs. Two children clutched her skirts and screeched in sympathy.
"What is to pay out there?" shouted the master, angrily. "Stop that noise!"
"Dar's somefin' 'live in dar, suh!" Dick called back in trembling accents.