Frances sped upward to her room. Susan had lighted a fire in the grate. She flung herself into the chair before it and covered her face with her hands.

It was unbelievable! Without the excuse of one word of love-making she had allowed what even the Beauty would have fenced gayly against and held off, for a time, at least. All her training, the traditions of her childhood and maidenhood, beat against her fiercely. She slid from the chair to the rug, pressed her face into it, her arms close flung about her head, shutting out the accusations the dusky room was pulsing with; but she shut them the more closely in her heart and they rang there. They were wordless, but she knew them, was conscious of them from head to foot.

All her sweet dignity and gay ease—though she thought not of herself in such[Pg 140] manner, only in hot, resentful scorn—were set at naught, and she had played to its full the part she had strenuously held herself from, the love of an hour of a University man.

She was suffocated with shame, hot with anger. There was no memory of a swift sudden joy, such as swept over Lawson that moment, standing in his room alone; remembrance was burnt out by angry resentment at herself and him. She hated him for the agony she felt. It was against such an hour as this her first instincts had warned her and she had not heeded. She would heed now. She would never see him again, were it possible; and, that being impossible, she would find ways of putting days before the evil moment.

When she heard her father in the hall she stumbled to her feet, she bathed her hot face and straightened her stock and smoothed her rumpled hair; but when she flashed the electric light into the bulb above her mirror, she shrank back affrighted from the face pictured there. She could never go down with such a tale written on[Pg 141] it as she herself could read. She began slowly walking up and down her long, high-ceilinged room, pressing back her tormented thoughts behind the doors of resolve. Had she been given to headaches or sudden small illnesses, how gladly would she have pleaded them, but such would have been so abnormal as to demand a physician. She smiled as she thought of her father's and Susan's dismay and Dr. Randall's swift summons; and, thinking of others, she won self-control.

She went down the stair, slowly at first, and then, near the foot, with swift step and eyes averted from the spot there beneath the circle of white light.

Her father looked up with dreamy eyes. He was absorbed in his books. Frances drew a little sobbing breath of relief. She would not be called upon to make any effort. She picked up a well-thumbed and well-loved copy of Burroughs and slipped into her chair. The book lay open on her knees; she knew her father was heedless of the unturned leaves.

[Pg 142]

But at the supper table, a cup clattered against a saucer as she handed them, Susan saw; the food on her plate was untouched, jealous black eyes from the half-opened pantry door watched—she was white, her gray eyes were dark and troubled—jealous eyes of an old bent darkey who would have shut every trouble from her, heeded, and keenly enough contrasted them with the brilliant laughing face she had looked into when she opened the door in the dusk of the afternoon. There had been one visitor since then; she knew at whose door to lay the blame.

When Frances came into the kitchen an hour later with a great pretence of gayety the old woman read her through and through.

"Susan, just think," she cried, "I'm going away on an early train to-morrow!"

"'Fore Gawd!" said Susan to herself, "it's wuss than I thought."

"You'll give me an early breakfast?" coaxingly.

"Think I'm gwine let yuh go widout anything ter eat," snapped Susan, cross in her anxiety. "Whar yuh gwine?"

[Pg 143]

"Down to Cousin Tom's; he says he wants me to come; he wrote to father to-day." Frances was making powerful use of a casual invitation at the end of a business note. "Father has just told me. I'm going to-morrow. It's the very time, the weather is lovely. We'll gather walnuts and—and persimmons."

The constrained manner had no effect in fooling Susan. "Plenty walnuts up de road," she grumbled, "and as for 'simmons, 'simmons! I don't see nuthin' else in de fence corners anywhars, myself."

"Oh, Susan, it isn't that," half tearfully. "I want to go."

"Em—hm! So I thought, wants to go!" Susan opened the stove door and flung in a piece of wood—she could never be persuaded to cook with coal—and banged the door wrathfully. "What yo' pa gwine do widout you? How's I gwine get erlong?"

"You will get along all right. You know a lot more about housekeeping than I do. What I know you taught me."

[Pg 144]

This was one of Susan's prides—her own skill and her ready pupil's.

"How's dat young man foreber trapsin' aroun' hyar gwine git erlong?"

"Who?" asked the girl faintly.

"Who? Who dat I open de do' for dis ebenin', I wants ter know?"

Frances drooped. A tide of red swept her face from chin to forehead.

"Dat's it, dog-gone him!" said Susan, in her jealous old heart.

The young girl straightened herself proudly and looked her tormentor straight in the eye.

"He's never been 'trapsing,' as you call it," she said with cold haughtiness, "and there'll be neither getting along with or without him as far as I am concerned." She turned and walked out of the room, head high, shoulders straight; and she banged the door a trifle behind her.

"Hi—yi!" chuckled Susan, delighted, "dat's de stuff! Aint gwine git erlong wid or widout him! Aint no dy-away-ed-ness 'bout dat!"

[Pg 145]

She showed her favor by the hot delicious breakfast she had ready early next morning, and she went cheerily about coaxing Frances to eat and taking no notice of her pale languor except to say, "it was suttenly hard to start abroad befo' sun-up dese mornin's," and altogether bolstering and buoying up Frances.

"Don't stay too long, honey, don't stay too long; I's gwine take good care o' Marse Robert, but don't stay too long," she urged at last, as Frances stood on the low step leading down to the corridor, looking furtively up and down. It was deserted. Susan's one swift glance had told her that, and the quadrangle looked cold and bare: frost glistened on the grass and on the naked branches of the maples, the vine rustled its dry tendrils about the pillar.

"Hurry erlong, chile, or yuh'll miss de train," warned Susan, watching them hastening across the campus before she went back to her work.

The professor, with discomfiture besetting him, had hurried on with Frances. It was [Pg 146]altogether too cold and uncomfortable for talk. They caught a car, just made the train; he had scarce had time to think when he came slowly up the stair in the hillside to meet young Montague at the top.

"What are you going to do?" Edward asked after a second's silence.

"I suppose we'll get along somehow. Susan—"

"I meant now," said the young man with a short laugh; "there's scarce time to get out home," he added briskly. "Come, walk down town and we'll go to church after a while."

"Well!" the professor turned townward with a strange and unwonted distaste for the empty house back there facing the quadrangle. "You will come back out with me," he insisted, thinking of the loneliness.

The young man nodded his assent. Once there, however, if the loneliness did not so much oppress the professor it was like a weight to his guest.

The theories of agricultu............