she did not mean to dance. Charity
did not dance often either. Harney explained to her that Miss Hatchard
had begged him to give each of the other girls a turn; but he went
through the form of asking Charity's permission each time he led one
out, and that gave her a sense of secret triumph even completer than
when she was whirling about the room with him.

She was thinking of all this as she waited for him in the deserted
house. The late afternoon was sultry, and she had tossed aside her hat
and stretched herself at full length on the Mexican blanket because it
was cooler indoors than under the trees. She lay with her arms folded
beneath her head, gazing out at the shaggy shoulder of the Mountain. The
sky behind it was full of the splintered glories of the descending sun,
and before long she expected to hear Harney's bicycle-bell in the lane.
He had bicycled to Hamblin, instead of driving there with his cousin
and her friends, so that he might be able to make his escape earlier
and stop on the way back at the deserted house, which was on the road
to Hamblin. They had smiled together at the joke of hearing the crowded
buck-boards roll by on the return, while they lay close in their
hiding above the road. Such childish triumphs still gave her a sense of
reckless security.

Nevertheless she had not wholly forgotten the vision of fear that had
opened before her in the Town Hall. The sense of lastingness was gone
from her and every moment with Harney would now be ringed with doubt.

The Mountain was turning purple against a fiery sunset from which it
seemed to be divided by a knife-edge of quivering light; and above
this wall of flame the whole sky was a pure pale green, like some cold
mountain lake in shadow. Charity lay gazing up at it, and watching for
the first white star....

Her eyes were still fixed on the upper reaches of the sky when she
became aware that a shadow had flitted across the glory-flooded room: it
must have been Harney passing the window against the sunset.... She half
raised herself, and then dropped back on her folded arms. The combs had
slipped from her hair, and it trailed in a rough dark rope across her
breast. She lay quite still, a sleepy smile on her lips, her indolent
lids half shut. There was a fumbling at the padlock and she called out:
"Have you slipped the chain?" The door opened, and Mr. Royall walked
into the room.

She started up, sitting back against the cushions, and they looked a