“I know they were,” the old woman insisted. “She may have hidden it in there before you all, but when she came in here just now she stopped right near me and looked me full in the face, and never since she was a little baby have I seen such an odd look in her eyes. They looked like they were about to burst with tears. She saw me looking at her, and she come up behind me and laid her face down against my neck. She quivered all over, and then she said, ‘Oh, Granny! Oh, Granny!’ and then she straightened up and went right out at that door into the yard. I tell you, it’s got to let up. She sha’n’t have the life deviled out of her. If she don’t want to marry that preacher, she don’t have to. As for me, I’d rather have married any sort of man on earth when I was young than a long-legged, straight-faced preacher.”
“You say she went out in the yard?” said Mrs. Porter absently. “I wonder what she went out there for.”
Mrs. Porter went to the door and looked out. There was a clothesline stretched between two apple trees nearby, and Cynthia stood at it taking down a tablecloth. She turned with it in her arms and came to her mother.
“I just remembered,” she said, “that there isn’t a clean cloth for the table. Mother, the iron is hot on the stove. You go back to the girls and I’ll smooth this out and set the table.”
The eyes of the two met. Mrs. Porter took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “I’ll go back to the company, but I’ve got something to say, and then I’m done for good. I want to say that I’m glad a daughter of mine has got the proper pride and spunk you have. I see you are not going to make a goose of yourself before visitors, and I’m proud of you. You are the right sort—especially after he’s acted in the scandalous way he has and—and laid you, even as good a girl as you, liable to be talked about for keeping company with him.”
The girl’s eyes sank. Something seemed to rise and struggle up within her, for her breast heaved and her shoulders quivered convulsively.
“I’ll fix the cloth,” she said in a low, forced voice, “and then I’ll set the table and call you.”
“All right”; Mrs. Porter was turning away. “I’ll try to keep them entertained till you come back.”
CHAPTER IX
Beneath a big oak Pole stood holding his bridle-rein and waiting, his earnest gaze on the long road leading to Jeff Wade’s farm. Suddenly he descried a cloud of dust far ahead and he chuckled.