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Updated: June 15, 2025
Caley is sick, and Sim's on the mountain with the cattle. Father isn't here." He mounted to the portico, mentally formulating a way of speedy escape; he thought, everywhere he turned Lettice Hollidew stood with her tiresome smile. "I come out here every summer," she volunteered, sinking upon a step, "and spend two weeks.
It carried to him, in an intangible manner, a fleet warning, as though something immense, unguessed, august, uttered through Lettice Hollidew the whisper of a magnificent and terrible menace. He felt again as he had felt as a child before the vast mystery of night. An impulse seized him to hurry away from the portico, from the youthful figure at his side; a sudden, illogical fear chilled him.
Then things would be different. He made himself no extravagant promises of reform, no fevered reproaches; but things would be different. He would take Lettice driving; he had the prettiest young wife in Greenstream, and he would show people that he realized it. She had been Lettice Hollidew, the daughter of old Pompey, the richest man in the county.
Sim or his wife think they're going to die two or three times the year, and bother the Father.... But I wouldn't wonder they would, and them working for Hollidew, dawn, day and dark, with never a proper skinful of food, only this and that, maybe, chick'ry and fat pork and moldy ends of nothing."
Suddenly he saw, partially hidden by the dull dresses of the older women, a white, ruffled skirt, the turn of a young shoulder, a drooping straw hat. A meager, intervening form moved, and he saw that Lettice Hollidew had come to his sister's funeral. He wondered, in a momentary, instinctive resentment, what had brought her among this largely negligent gathering.
This laudable assumption was, however, immediately upset by the absent nod he bestowed upon Lettice, and the evident interest and relief with which he turned to the stranger descending from the stage. "Mr. Hollidew?" the latter inquired, with ill-concealed surprise.
It whistled above the horses, causing them to plunge, and the lash, stopped suddenly, drew across Buckley Simmons' face. For an instant his startled countenance was white, and then it was wet, gleaming and scarlet. He pressed his hands to his mouth, and stumbled confused into the ditch. Gordon stopped the stage. Merlier gave vent to a sibilant exclamation, and Lattice Hollidew covered her eyes.
He disappeared, clutching the stranger's sleeve, with an effort at geniality. Simmons' clerk ruefully tested the weight of a small, heavily nailed box. Lettice Hollidew slowly assembled her traveling effects. It was evident that she wished to say something to Gordon, for she lingered, patently playing with her gloves, directing at him bright, nervous glances from under the straw brim of her hat.
Gordon thought again of Lettice Hollidew as he was sitting for the last evening on the porch of the dwelling that had passed out of his hands. Twilight had poured through the valley, thickening beneath the trees, over the stream; the mountain ranges were dark, dusty blue against a maroon sky.
Gordon Makimmon had known Lettice Hollidew, now speaking in little, girlish rushes behind him, since her first appearance in a baby carriage, nineteen or twenty years back.
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