“Where were you yesterday when Daria took the Cup?” she asked immediately.
“By Fallen Tree, not twenty steps from you—but you were so taken up with that affair that you did not see me.”
“You heard, then, what her young man said about”—she flushed sensitively—“his reasons for her not drinking. Have you heard anything of that in the Meet?”
This was not strictly true, for Evarra had told me that all those who had opposed Trastevera’s exemption ten years before were now justifying themselves in Daria’s rebellion.
“They are saying what I feared,” she said, “that it is a mistake to release the possessor of gifts from the common obligation.”
“They are wrong, then, for nothing has come of it but the momentary outburst of a sensitive spirit. After all, Daria fulfilled her vows.”
She looked at me curiously for a moment, as if she were not sure what to make of me. We were walking up and down behind the trees, her dress a-flutter, her small hands clasping and unclasping, her body rippling with the expressive accompaniment of excitement which was as natural to her as the unstrained stillness of repose.
“Do you not think it wrong,” she said, “when the findings of the Council are scorned, and I—even I—make secret occasion to talk of forbidden things?”
“And this plan which is hatched between your man and Mancha, perhaps you see no wrong in that?”
She was too guileless herself to have taken that method on purpose, but I felt my spirit curling like a dried leaf out of all proportion to her news. I managed to answer steadily.
“He is not my man.” It did not occur to me until afterward that it would have been a surer form of denial not to acknowledge so readily what man. “And as for any plans he may have with Mancha or any other, I do not know what they are. Nor would I be interested except that I see it troubles you.”
All the time I was resenting unreasonably that Herman should have any plans with anybody and not broach them first to me.
“I do not know very well what it is myself,” she said more quietly, “except that it grows out of this unhappy episode of Daria’s. It must refer to the Wardship, because it is rumored about that the Meet, instead of breaking up on the evening when the keepers come back, will hold over another day for Council. That must be because they wish to talk of matters that may not be opened earlier. It is Mancha, I think, who wishes it. When some of the elders reproved Daria’s lover for having allowed himself to love a Ward, and for speaking so lightly of the Keeping, Mancha said that a man could not help where his heart went, and that there was too much truth in what the young man said. Myself, I cannot account for it.”