"Oh, no; I don't suppose so," she said, a little distant and cold in her manner.
Joe stood there for a little while, looking at her hands as they flew from plate to plate like white butterflies, as if something had stirred in him that he did not understand. Presently he went his way to take up his work, no more words passing between them.
Ollie, from under her half raised lids, watched him go, tiptoeing swiftly after him to the door as he went down the path toward the well. Her breath was quick upon her lips; her breast was agitated. If that slow hunk could be warmed with a man's passions and desires; if she could wake him; if she could fling fire into his heart! He was only a boy, the man in him just showing its strong face behind that mask of wild, long hair. It lay there waiting to move him in ways yet strange to his experience. If she might send her whisper to that still slumbering force and charge it into life a day before its time!
She stood with hand upon the door, trailing him with her eyes as he passed on to the barn. She felt that she had all but reached beyond the insulation of his adolescence in that burning moment when her breath was on his cheek; she knew that the wood, even that hour, was warm under the fire. What might a whisper now, a smile then, a kindness, a word, a hand laid softly upon his hair, work in the days to come?
She turned back to her work, her mind stirred out of its sluggish rut, the swirl of her new thoughts quickening in her blood. Isom Chase would not die; he would live on and on, harder, drier, stingier year by year, unless a bolt from heaven withered him or the hand of man laid him low. What might come to him, he deserved, even the anguish of death with a strangling cord about his neck; even the strong blow of an ax as he slept on his bed, snatching from him the life that he had debased of all its beauty, without the saving chance of repentance in the end.
She had thought of doing it with her own hand; a hundred ways she had planned and contrived it in her mind, goaded on nearer and nearer to it by his inhuman oppressions day by day. But her heart had recoiled from it as a task for the hand of a man. If a man could be raised up to it, a man who had suffered servitude with her, a man who would strike for the double vengeance, and the love of her in his heart!