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A fleeting contempt stirred the beauty of the girl's face for a moment, and then she told him of that which was seething in her heart. "What does it matter, Jerry-Jo? All my life, ever since I can remember, I have been growing surely to what is now near at hand. I cannot abide my father; nor can he find comfort in me. Why should I darken the lives of my parents and have no life of my own?
"Oh, Jerry-Jo, do you remember the first book?" "Do I?" Jerry-Jo had shouldered the box of seeds and now bent upon the girl a glad, softened look. "Do I? You was a wild thing then, Priscilla.
It was all for her own good, the evil fellow thought. "I'll be kind to her when I get her. I'm only playing her with the hook in her mouth." But Jerry-Jo was scheming without considering the Lure, which never was long absent from Priscilla's mind at that time.
Presently she controlled herself, and took to the path again, and reached John Boswell's house before he had left his window. She did not tell of the encounter; she felt she must wait, but in her heart she knew that Jerry-Jo McAlpin was as surely on her trail as she was herself. Such things as that meeting did not happen to them of the In-Place unless for a purpose.
Jerry-Jo in earnest would be unbearable. And then, just as she reached the pasture bars separating her father's farm from the red rock highway, Jerry-Jo McAlpin strode in sight from the wood path into which the highway ran. She waited for him and gave him a nervous smile as he came near. His first words startled her out of her dull mood. "I've been up to the Hill Place.
They told you, lilting along, of a road that no one but you ever knew a road that led in and out through wonders of beauty and faded at the day's end into your heart's desire. Your Heart's Desire! And just then Jerry-Jo cried: "Hey, there! you, Priscilla, come down with that book." "Your Heart's Desire!" Priscilla's eyes were misty as she repeated the words.
Then he began to whimper piteously. A shuddering cry rang out. It was Mary McAdam, who, followed by her dog, ran wildly, apron over head, toward the White Fish Lodge. Farwell, casting all reserve aside, worked with Ledyard over the prostrate Jerry-Jo.
She could not leave him to wander alone at night in that big, strange place. No matter what happened, she must treat him humanly, she, who knew the danger. She went back, her blood running like ice through her body; but Jerry-Jo McAlpin was not there. Priscilla waited, and once she spoke vague directions to the empty space, but no answering voice replied.
Shame on you! Have I no lads?" Silence. "Have I not trained them in the way they should go? Do I fear for them?" A grave silence, and McAlpin glared at Hornby, while an irreverent youth, with a fish dangling from his hands, laughed and muttered: "Like gorrems!" "Play a man's part, Jerry McAlpin. 'Tis not for Jerry-Jo you fear; it's my business you'd get from me, and you know it!
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