“She won’t stand it,” he thought.
“She isn’t long for this world.
Maybe it is all for the best, poor lass. But
I wish that young Master had never set foot in the
Connors orchard, or in this house. Margaret,
Margaret, it’s hard that your child should have
to be paying the reckoning of a sin that was sinned
before her birth.”
Kilmeny walked through the lane slowly and absently
like a woman in a dream. When she came to the
gap in the fence where the lane ran into the orchard
she lifted her wan, drooping face and saw Eric, sitting
in the shadow of the wood at the other side of the
orchard with his bowed head in his hands. She
stopped quickly and the blood rushed wildly over her
face.
The next moment it ebbed, leaving her white as marble.
Horror filled her eyes,—blank, deadly
horror, as the livid shadow of a cloud might fill
two blue pools.
Behind Eric Neil Gordon was standing tense, crouched,
murderous. Even at that distance Kilmeny saw
the look on his face, saw what he held in his hand,
and realized in one agonized flash of comprehension
what it meant.
All this photographed itself in her brain in an instant.
She knew that by the time she could run across the
orchard to warn Eric by a touch it would be too late.
Yet she must warn him—she must—she
must! A mighty surge of desire seemed to
rise up within her and overwhelm her like a wave of
the sea,—a surge that swept everything
before it in an irresistible flood. As Neil
Gordon swiftly and vindictively, with the face of a
demon, lifted the axe he held in his hand, Kilmeny
sprang forward through the gap.
“Eric, Eric, look behind
you—look behind you!”
Eric started up, confused, bewildered, as the voice
came shrieking across the orchard. He did not
in the least realize that it was Kilmeny who had called
to him, but he instinctively obeyed the command.
He wheeled around and saw Neil Gordon, who was looking,
not at him, but past him at Kilmeny. The Italian
boy’s face was ashen and his eyes were filled
with terror and incredulity, as if he had been checked
in his murderous purpose by some supernatural interposition.
The axe, lying at his feet where he had dropped it
in his unutterable consternation on hearing Kilmeny’s
cry told the whole tale. But before Eric could
utter a word Neil turned, with a cry more like that
of an animal than a human being, and fled like a hunted
creature into the shadow of the spruce wood.
A moment later Kilmeny, her lovely face dewed with
tears and sunned over with smiles, flung herself on
Eric’s breast.
“Oh, Eric, I can speak,—I can speak!
Oh, it is so wonderful! Eric, I love you—I
love you!”
“It is a miracle!” said Thomas Gordon
in an awed tone.
