"Say, I'll set up a bulletin board with my time-table on it if you've got to have it, Mr. Overseer!" said Morgan, looking up from the buckling of a shaft-strap, his face coloring in anger.
"Well, you don't need to get huffy over it."
"Mind your business then," Morgan growled.
He didn't wait to discuss the matter farther, but got into the buggy without favoring Joe with as much as another glance, gave his horse a vindictive lash with the whip and drove off, leaving the gate open behind him.
Joe shut it, and turned back to his mowing.
Many a time he paused that morning in his labor, leaning on the snath of his scythe, in a manner of abstraction and seeming indolence altogether strange to him. There was a scene, framed by the brown casing of the kitchen door, with two figures in it, two clinging hands, which persisted in its disturbing recurrence in his troubled mind.
Ollie was on dangerous ground. How far she had advanced, he did not know, but not yet, he believed, to the place where the foulness of Morgan had defiled her beyond cleansing. It was his duty as the guardian of his master's house to watch her, even to warn her, and to stop her before she went too far.
Once he put down his scythe and started to go to the house, his mind full of what he felt it his duty to say.
Then there rose up that feeling of disparity between matron and youth which had held him at a distance from Ollie before. He turned back to his work with a blush upon his sun-scorched face, and felt ashamed. But it was not a thing to be deferred until after the damage had been done. He must speak to her that day, perhaps when he should go in for dinner. So he said.
Ollie seemed self-contained and uncommunicative at dinner. Joe thought she was a little out of humor, or that she was falling back into her old gloomy way, from which she had emerged, all smiles and dimples, like a new and youthful creature, on the coming of Morgan. He thought, too, that this might be her way of showing her resentment of the familiarity that he had taken in calling her by her name.
The feeling of deputy-mastership was no longer important upon his shoulders. He shrank down in his chair with a sense of drawing in, like a snail, while he burned with humiliation and shame. The pinnacle of manhood was too slippery for his clumsy feet; he had plumped down from its altitudes as swiftly as he had mounted that morning under the spur of duty. He was a boy, and felt that he was a boy, and far, far from being anything nobler, or stronger, or better qualified to give saving counsel to a woman older, if not wiser, than himself.