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Updated: May 11, 2025
The horse snorted now and again as it felt the irritation in its nostrils, and blinked its eyes, until they were almost closed, to escape it; but Slaughter walked on oblivious to the dust, to the heat, to the time, to everything, save the growing consciousness of a dull mental pain that was beginning to gnaw and goad him into a state of mind very different to that which had held him while he was offering his sympathy to Ailleen.
Dickson mounted the steps leading on to the verandah, with Nellie close upon him and Ailleen further behind; while Bobby, not having outgrown the uneasiness of youth, remained in the saddle holding the bridles of the other three horses as well as his own. "Here's Nellie," Dickson said abruptly, as he reached the chair where the sightless woman sat.
It was sorrow which had driven Ailleen away from Birralong a sorrow and grief which the girl had bravely striven to keep in subjection by care and attention to the woman whose hospitality she was enjoying. But there was little heed of that in the mind of the Lady of Barellan.
Ailleen looked at him steadily for a while, watching his confusion and discomfiture, and feeling more and more angry with herself for having, earlier in the day, allowed his words to have even a passing effect upon her. "Look here," she repeated, yielding to a sudden impulse which came upon her to talk seriously to him, "I heard quite enough from Nellie to understand.
Dickson had to hear the tale she should hear it from him, with certain little embellishments and figurative allusions, which would effectually destroy any chance Ailleen might have of making capital out of the episode. "I heard quite enough," she answered.
So it was that when Ailleen heard Dickson denouncing Tony's appearance, she had been amused, until a chance remark struck her and set her thinking; and as she thought, the conviction grew upon her that the very subject of the remark which had struck her so forcibly had been in her mind, unconsciously, for years.
But her intuitions had struck the truth. When the thought of it forced his attention, or when a reference such as she had made to Ailleen revealed it to him in spite of himself, Tony winced under the sting of the girl's bearing towards him.
"I cannot bear to have him unhappy," the elder woman said, sticking loyally to the task the crafty youth had set her of softening the obdurate girl to an appreciation of him and a recognition of his possibilities as a suitor for her affections. Ailleen, glancing round the smoke-bedimmed horizon, caught sight of the figure of a man riding hastily across the paddock towards the house.
The grip on her arm might have been firmer than he meant; he might unconsciously have pushed her; but as he began to repeat again the formula of his sympathy, the only phrase which came to him through the mists of his sorrow and perplexity, Ailleen moved from her kneeling position as she slipped, pale and insensible, to the floor. For a moment Slaughter looked at her.
The thin switch Ailleen carried fell across the back of his hand sufficiently hard to induce him to let go. "If I tell Nellie what you said?" she remarked. "I was only in fun," he answered, the uneasy grin still on his face and his eyes shifting. "I only wanted to see if you would let them wait." The girl looked at him steadily.
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