“Who’s this?” asked Miss Taylor.
“The Cresswells, I think; they usually ride
to town about this time.” But already Miss
Taylor had descried the brown and tawny sides of the
speeding horses.
“Good gracious!” she thought. “The
Cresswells!” And with it came a sudden desire
not to meet them—just then. She glanced
toward the swamp. The sun was sifting blood-red
lances through the trees. A little wagon-road
entered the wood and disappeared. Miss Taylor
saw it.
“Let’s see the sunset in the swamp,”
she said suddenly. On came the galloping horses.
Bles looked up in surprise, then silently turned into
the swamp. The horses flew by, their hoof-beats
dying in the distance. A dark green silence lay
about them lit by mighty crimson glories beyond.
Miss Taylor leaned back and watched it dreamily till
a sense of oppression grew on her. The sun was
sinking fast.
“Where does this road come out?” she asked
at last.
“It doesn’t come out.”
“Where does it go?”
“It goes to Elspeth’s.”
“Why, we must turn back immediately. I
thought—” But Bles was already turning.
They were approaching the main road again when there
came a fluttering as of a great bird beating its wings
amid the forest. Then a girl, lithe, dark brown,
and tall, leaped lightly into the path with greetings
on her lips for Bles. At the sight of the lady
she drew suddenly back and stood motionless regarding
Miss Taylor, searching her with wide black liquid
eyes. Miss Taylor was a little startled.
“Good—good-evening,” she said,
straightening herself.
The girl was still silent and the horse stopped.
One tense moment pulsed through all the swamp.
Then the girl, still motionless—still looking
Miss Taylor through and through—said with
slow deliberateness:
“I hates you.”
The teacher in Miss Taylor strove to rebuke this unconventional
greeting but the woman in her spoke first and asked
almost before she knew it—
“Why?”
Five
Zora, child of the swamp, was a heathen hoyden of
twelve wayward, untrained years. Slight, straight,
strong, full-blooded, she had dreamed her life away
in wilful wandering through her dark and sombre kingdom
until she was one with it in all its moods; mischievous,
secretive, brooding; full of great and awful visions,
steeped body and soul in wood-lore. Her home
was out of doors, the cabin of Elspeth her port of
call for talking and eating. She had not known,
she had scarcely seen, a child of her own age until
Bles Alwyn had fled from her dancing in the night,
and she had searched and found him sleeping in the
misty morning light. It was to her a strange
new thing to see a fellow of like years with herself,
and she gripped him to her soul in wild interest and
new curiosity. Yet this childish friendship was
so new and incomprehensible a thing to her that she
did not know how to express it. At first she
pounced upon him in mirthful, almost impish glee, teasing
and mocking and half scaring him, despite his fifteen
years of young manhood.
