第24章

Teresa started,and communicated unconsciously some of her nervousness to her companion.They gazed in each other's eyes with a troubled expression.

"Do you think it was wise to sell that particular skin,which might be identified?"she asked timidly.

Low knitted his arched brows,but felt a strange sense of relief.

"Perhaps not,"he said carelessly;"but it's too late now to mend matters."That afternoon she wrote several letters,and tore them up.One,however,she retained,and handed it to Low to post at Indian Spring,whither he was going.She called his attention to the superion,being the same as the previous letter,and added,with affected gayety,"But if the answer isn't as prompt,perhaps it will be pleasanter than the last."Her quick feminine eye noticed a little excitement in his manner and a more studious attention to his dress.Only a few days before she would not have allowed this to pass without some mischievous allusion to his mysterious sweetheart;it troubled her greatly now to find that she could not bring herself to this household pleasantry,and that her lip trembled and her eye grew moist as he parted from her.

The afternoon passed slowly;he had said he might not return to supper until late,nevertheless a strange restlessness took possession of her as the day wore on.She put aside her work,the darning of his stockings,and rambled aimlessly through the woods.She had wandered she knew not how far,when she was suddenly seized with the same vague sense of a foreign presence which she had felt before.Could it be Curson again,with a word of warning?No!she knew it was not he;so subtle had her sense become that she even fancied that she detected in the invisible aura projected by the unknown no significance or relation to herself or Low,and felt no fear.Nevertheless she deemed it wisest to seek the protection of her sylvan bower,and hurried swiftly thither.

But not so quickly nor directly that she did not once or twice pause in her flight to examine the new-comer from behind a friendly trunk.He was a stranger--a young fellow with a brown mustache,wearing heavy Mexican spurs in his riding-boots,whose tinkling he apparently did not care to conceal.He had perceived her,and was evidently pursuing her,but so awkwardly and timidly that she eluded him with ease.When she had reached the security of the hollow tree and pulled the curtain of bark before the narrow opening,with her eye to the interstices,she waited his coming.He arrived breathlessly in the open space before the tree where the bear once lay;the dazed,bewildered,and half-awed expression of his face,as he glanced around him and through the openings of the forest aisles,brought a faint smile to her saddened face.At last he called in a half-embarrassed voice:--"Miss Nellie!"

The smile faded from Teresa's cheek.Who was "Miss Nellie?"She pressed her ear to the opening."Miss Wynn!"the voice again called,but was lost in the echoless woods.Devoured with a new gratuitous curiosity,in another moment Teresa felt she would have disclosed herself at any risk,but the stranger rose and began to retrace his steps.Long after his tinkling spurs were lost in the distance,Teresa remained like a statue,staring at the place where he had stood.Then she suddenly turned like a mad woman,glanced down at the gown she was wearing,tore it from her back as if it had been a polluted garment,and stamped upon it in a convulsion of rage.And then,with her beautiful bare arms clasped together over her head,she threw herself upon her couch in a tempest of tears.