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As Alice turned from looking after Joe, the eyes of the young women met, and again Ollie felt the cold stern question which Alice seemed to ask her, and to insist with unsparing hardness that she answer. A little way along Alice turned her head and held Ollie's eyes with her own again.
What a white soul that strong young woman had, said he; what a beautiful and spotless heart. In that kiss which she had stooped to press on the young widow's forehead she had wiped away the difference which Ollie's sin had set between her and other women. It was an act of generosity without ostentation, which he doubted whether Alice Price herself was aware of in its farthest significance.
He had just stopped to speak to some one, and Ollie, losing no time, opened the window and called to him. "Papa, papa," she called, "do you think it is safe for Lucy to try to go home?" The wind was making such a terrible noise that Ollie's voice could not be heard. Mr. Rogers dismounted and came to the window.
She led the way to her favorite spot, high up on the shoulder of Dewey, and there, with Mutton Hollow at their feet and the big hills about them, with the long blue ridges in the distance beyond which lay Ollie's world, she told him what he feared to learn. The man refused to believe that he heard aright.
Lucy hastily slipped on her clothes, and then, going back to the bed, she took Ollie's hand and called softly, "Ollie, Ollie! wake up. There is a wreck, and I think some of the people have gone down to the beach. Don't you want to go too?" Ollie started up, looking frightened at being so suddenly roused. "What is it? what is it?" she asked excitedly. "What is the matter?"
When he finished, the coroner bent over his note-book again, as if little interested and less impressed. Silence fell over the room. Then the coroner spoke, his head still bent over the book, not even turning his face toward the witness, his voice soft and low. "You were alone with Isom in the kitchen when this happened?" A flash of heat ran over Ollie's body.
Perhaps it was Ollie's purpose to inspire such feeling, and to hold Joe in his place. She was neither so dull, nor so unpractised in the arts of coquetry, to make such a supposition improbable. It was only when Joe sighted Morgan driving back to the farm late in the afternoon that his feeling of authority asserted itself again, and lifted him up to the task before him.
Ollie's room, which was Isom's also when he was there, was in the front of the house, upstairs. Joe heard her feet along the hall, and her door close after her. Morgan was still tramping about in the room next to Joe's, where he slept. It was the best room in the house, better than the one shared by Isom and his wife, and in the end of the house opposite to it.
"I'm glad to hear that," said Montague. "So was I," replied she. "And I said to him afterward, 'I suppose you don't know that Allan Montague is my Ollie's brother. And he did you the honour to say that he hadn't supposed any member of Ollie's family could have as much sense!" Betty was staying with an aunt near by, and she went back before dinner.
At last he went back to the place where he had dropped his scythe, and cut a swath straight through to the tree where Ollie's bonnet had hung. And there he mowed the trampled clover, and obliterated her footprints with his own. The weight of his discovery was like some dead thing on his breast. He felt that Ollie had fallen from the high heaven of his regard, never to mount to her place again.
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