'You'll never attain to them, you lazy Southron. Tell as about your camp life.'
'There's very little to tell. Drill, smoke, loaf—begging your pardon for the rough expression of a rough fact—drill again. As one day is, so is another; they're all alike.'
'Well, tell us about your getting wounded, then, and the fight. George will not get wounded himself, in spite of my repeated requests to that effect.'
And so Moore fought his battle over again, in the midst of which Miss Berkeley dropped out of the talk, folded some soft brilliant net over her light dress, and went down the walk leading to the shore, and he did not see her again that night.
After that he spent much of his time below stairs. Much alone; there were walks and rides in which he could take no part. Despite of George's prediction, he had peace and quiet, and gathered strength hourly. Whatever of graciousness he had seen or fancied in Miss Berkeley's manner in that first unexpected meeting had all vanished. A subtile, unconquerable something shut her out from all friendliness of speech or action. She went about the house in her slow, abstracted way, or in her other mood, with sudden darting motions like a swallow, or dreamed all day beside the summer sea, coming back browner and with mistier looks in her gray eyes, but always alone and unapproachable. So that in half a dozen days he had not received as many voluntary sentences from her.
But one morning the clouds had gathered black and heavy. The sea fogs had pitched their tents to landward, and their misty battalions were driving gray across the landscape. Dim reaches of blank water—lay beyond, weltering with an uneasy, rocking motion against the low, dark sky. White, ghostly sea birds wheeled low, a fretful wind grieved about the house, and a New England northeast storm was in progress. She was standing at the window, looking out with eyes farther away than ever over the haze-draped sea. Some fine, heavy material, the same indistinct hue as the day outside, fell about her in large, sweeping folds. A breath of sudden, penetrating perfume struck across his senses as he approached her. 'And gray heliotrope!' he said; but the heliotrope vanished as she turned and displayed the blaze of carnations at her throat, and the gleam of crimson silk under the jaunty zouave.
'Lois Pearl Berkeley,' he read from the golden thimble he had nearly crushed under foot. He half wondered if she would know what it was. He never saw her do anything. She was never 'engaged,' nor in haste about any occupation. The perfect freedom from the universal Yankee necessity of motion, with which the brown, small hands fell before her, was as thoroughly a part of her as the strange Indian scent which clung to everything she touched, and sphered her like the atmosphere of another world. He never could associate the idea of any kind of personal care-taking with her dainty leisure, more than with the lilies of the field, though they never appeared in as many graceful arrays as she.
'Yes, mine, thank you,' she said, and composedly dropped it into its place in the most orderly of useless conglomerations of silken pockets and puzzling pigeon holes. He watched her fingers, and then looked back at her.
'Lois—such an odd name for you—such a quaint, staid Puritan name.'
'And I am neither quaint nor staid nor Puritan. Thank you. Yes, my mother must have had recollections of her New England home strong on her when she gave it me, down on the Louisiana shores. It always sounded even to me a little strange and frigid among such half-tropical surroundings.'