Charity started back and flushed. For a moment she thought the evangelist must have heard a report of the scene at Nettleton; then she saw the absurdity of the supposition.
“I on’y wish’t I had any to lay!” she retorted, with one of her fierce flashes of self-derision; and the young man murmured, aghast: “Oh, Sister, don’t speak blasphemy….”
But she had jerked her arm out of his hold, and was running up the branch road, trembling with the fear of meeting a familiar face. Presently she was out of sight of the village, and climbing into the heart of the forest. She could not hope to do the fifteen miles to the Mountain that afternoon; but she knew of a place half-way to Hamblin where she could sleep, and where no one would think of looking for her. It was a little deserted house on a slope in one of the lonely rifts of the hills. She had seen it once, years before, when she had gone on a nutting expedition to the grove of walnuts below it. The party had taken refuge in the house from a sudden mountain storm, and she remembered that Ben Sollas, who liked frightening girls, had told them that it was said to be haunted.
She was growing faint and tired, for she had eaten nothing since morning, and was not used to walking so far. Her head felt light and she sat down for a moment by the roadside. As she sat there she heard the click of a bicycle-bell, and started up to plunge back into the forest; but before she could move the bicycle had swept around the curve of the road, and Harney, jumping off, was approaching her with outstretched arms.
“Charity! What on earth are you doing here?”
She stared as if he were a vision, so startled by the unexpectedness of his being there that no words came to her.
“Where were you going? Had you forgotten that I was coming?” he continued, trying to draw her to him; but she shrank from his embrace.
“I was going away–I don’t want to see you–I want you should leave me alone,” she broke out wildly.
He looked at her and his face grew grave, as though the shadow of a premonition brushed it.
“Going away–from me, Charity?”
“From everybody. I want you should leave me.”
He stood glancing doubtfully up and down the lonely forest road that stretched away into sun-flecked distances.
“Where were you going?’
“Home.”
“Home–this way?”
She threw her head back defiantly. “To my home–up yonder: to the Mountain.”
As she spoke she became aware of a change in his face. He was no longer listening to her, he was only looking at her, with the passionate absorbed expression she had seen in his eyes after they had kissed on the stand at Nettleton. He was the new Harney again, the Harney abruptly revealed in that embrace, who seemed so penetrated with the joy of her presence that he was utterly careless of what she was thinking or feeling.
He caught her hands with a laugh. “How do you suppose I found you?” he said gaily. He drew out the little packet of his letters and flourished them before her bewildered eyes.
“You dropped them, you imprudent young person–dropped them in the middle of the road, not far from here; and the young man who is running the Gospel tent picked them up just as I was riding by.” He drew back, holding her at arm’s length, and scrutinizing her troubled face with the minute searching gaze of his short-sighted eyes.
“Did you really think you could run away from me? You see you weren’t meant to,” he said; and before she could answer he had kissed her again, not vehemently, but tenderly, almost fraternally, as if he had guessed her confused pain, and wanted her to know he understood it. He wound his fingers through hers.
“Come let’s walk a little. I want to talk to you. There’s so much to say.”
He spoke with a boy’s gaiety, carelessly and confidently, as if nothing had happened that could shame or embarrass them; and for a moment, in the sudden relief of her release from lonely pain, she felt herself yielding to his mood. But he had turned, and was drawing her back along the road by which she had come. She stiffened herself and stopped short.