She clutched at the fence-rail as if she feared his violence.
He folded his arms quietly, his face grown suddenly rigid.
“Something has happened since the other day,” he said. “What is it?”
He took two long steps and stood over her, big, powerful, threatening.
“You shall answer me. Who or what is it that has come between us?”
Again he waited for her to speak; but she stood mute with bent head.
“You’ll not answer me,” he said, in a cold, hard voice. “Well, be it so; go your way, and I’ll go mine. But—I shall not give you up. You’re killing yourself with hard work; it is I who force you to it. I am your master. You can’t escape me!”
“You are not my master!” she said wildly. “I’m free—free!”
He turned without another look at her, his savage heel grinding an innocent clover blossom into the mud of the road.
BARBARA stole softly down the creaking stair in the gray obscurity of dawn, her shoes in one hand, a smoking candle in the other. There was much to be done, much to be thought of, and Jimmy must not wake up to hinder for two full hours yet.
It was cold in the kitchen, and the faint pink light streaming from the east shone in uncertainty through misted panes. Barbara sat down, her red lips sternly compressed, her dark brows drawn in a frowning line above her eyes, and applied herself briskly to lacing up her shoes. It was a relief to be accomplishing something real, tangible, after the whirling mist of dreams from which she had emerged shaken and breathless. Dreams of any description seldom visited Barbara’s healthily tired brain, but the vanished darkness of the past night had been haunted with confused visions. Now Stephen Jarvis was pursuing her through trackless forests, where long branches reached down like crooked, grasping hands. Always she managed to elude her pursuer and always he followed, his panting breath in her ears, till suddenly stumbling and falling through a vast crevasse in the darkness she found herself on a wide plain, starred with narcissus, swaying spirit-like in the bright air; high overhead white clouds floated and the winds of May blew cool fragrance into her face. At first she was alone, seeking for something, she knew not what; then David Whitcomb stood at her side.