An hour afterwards, dressed as only Mammy Maria could dress her, Helen had walked out again to the rock under the wild grape vine.
How sweet and peaceful it was, and yet how changed since but a short time ago she had sat there watching for Harry!
"Harry"--she pulled out the crumpled, tear-stained note from her bosom and read it again. And the reading surprised her. She expected to weep, but instead when she had finished she sat straight up on the mossy rock and from her eyes gleamed again the light before which the political enemies of the old dead Governor had so often quailed.
Nor did it change in intensity, when, at the sound of wheels and the clatter of hoofs, she instinctively dropped down on the moss behind the rock and saw through the grape leaves one of Richard Travis's horses, steaming hot, and stepping,--right up to its limit--a clipping gait down the road.
She had dropped instinctively because she guessed it was Harry. And instinctively, too, she knew the girl with the loud boisterous laugh beside him was Nellie.
The buggy was wheeled so rapidly past that she heard only broken notes of laughter and talk. Then she sat again upon her rock, with the deep flush in her eyes, and said:
"I hate--him--I hate him--and oh--to think--"
She tore his note into fragments, twisted and rolled them into a ball and shot it, as a marble, into the gulch below.
Then, suddenly she remembered, and reaching over she looked into a scarred crevice in the rock. Twice that summer had Clay Westmore left her a quaint love note in this little rock-lined post-office. Quaint indeed, and they made her smile, for they had been queer mixtures of geology and love. But they were honest--and they had made her flush despite the fact that she did not love him.
Still she would read them two or three times and sigh and say: "Poor Clay--" after every reading.
"Surely there will be one this afternoon," she thought as she peeped over.
But there was not, and it surprised her to know how much she was disappointed.
"Even Clay has forgotten me," she said as she arose hastily to go.
A big sob sprang up into her throat and the Conway light of defiance, that had blazed but a few moments before in her eyes, died in the depths of the cloud of tears which poured between it and the open.