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Page 19
"Del is too pretty to be here alone so late," thought Asenath, smiling
tenderly. Good-natured Del was kind to her in a certain way, and she
rather loved the girl. She rose to speak to her, but concluded, on a
second glance through the aspens, that Miss Ivory was quite able to take
care of herself.
Del was sitting on an old log that jutted into the stream, dabbling in
the water with the tips of her feet. (Had she lived on The Avenue she
could not have been more particular about her shoemaker.) Some one--it
was too dark to see distinctly--stood beside her, his eyes upon her
face. Asenath could hear nothing, but she needed to hear nothing to know
how the young fellow's eyes drank in the coquettish picture. Besides, it
was an old story. Del counted her rejected lovers by the score.
"It's no wonder," she thought in her honest way, standing still to watch
them with a sense of puzzled pleasure much like that with which she
watched the print-windows,--"it's no wonder they love her. I'd love her
if I was a man: so pretty! so pretty! She's just good for nothing, Del
is;--would let the kitchen fire go out, and wouldn't mend the baby's
aprons; but I'd love her all the same; marry her, probably, and be sorry
all my life."
Pretty Del! Poor Del! Asenath wondered whether she wished that she were
like her; she could not quite make out; it would be pleasant to sit on
a log and look like that; it would be more pleasant to be watched as Del
was watched just now; it struck her suddenly that Dick had never looked
like this at her.
The hum of their voices ceased while she stood there with her eyes upon
them; Del turned her head away with a sudden movement, and the young man
left her, apparently without bow or farewell, sprang up the bank at a
bound, and crushed the undergrowth with quick, uneasy strides.
Asenath, with some vague idea that it would not be honorable to see his
face,--poor fellow!--shrank back into the aspens and the shadow.
He towered tall in the twilight as he passed her, and a dull, umber
gleam, the last of the sunset, struck him from the west.
Struck it out into her sight,--the haggard struggling face,--Richard
Cross's face.
Of course you knew it from the beginning, but remember that the girl did
not. She might have known it, perhaps, but she had not.
Asenath stood up, sat down again.
She had a distinct consciousness, for the moment, of seeing herself
crouched down there under the aspens and the shadow, a humpbacked white
creature, with distorted face and wide eyes. She remembered a picture
she had somewhere seen of a little chattering goblin in a graveyard, and
was struck with the resemblance. Distinctly, too, she heard herself
saying, with a laugh, she thought, "I might have known it; I might have
known."
Then the blood came through her heart with a hot rush, and she saw Del
on the log, smoothing the red feather of her hat. She heard a man's
step, too, that rang over the bridge, passed the toll-house, grew faint,
grew fainter, died in the sand by the Everett Mill.
Richard's face! Richard's face, looking--God help her!--as it had never
looked at her; struggling--God pity him!--as it had never struggled for
her.
She shut her hands, into each other, and sat still a little while. A
faint hope came to her then perhaps, after all; her face lightened
grayly, and she crept down the bank to Del.
"I won't be a fool," she said, "I'll make sure,--I'll make as sure as
death."
"Well, where did _you_ drop down from, Sene?" said Del, with a guilty
start.
"From over the bridge, to be sure. Did you think I swam, or flew, or
blew?"
"You came on me so sudden!" said Del, petulantly; "you nearly frightened
the wits out of me. You didn't meet anybody on the bridge?" with a quick
look.
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