ss was now in her voice. "It was some
one else."

A feeling of alarm rose in the other girl. It was not the lie alone,
it was the force behind it, the force that made it possible, that gave
the teller will to hold her glance steady and deny the truth. A
scaring sense of desperate powers in Lucy that were carrying her
outside the familiar and established, seized her friend. It was all
different from her expectations. Her personal repugnance and
fastidiousness were swept aside in the menace of larger things. She
leaned forward and clasped Lucy's knee.

"Don't say that. I saw you. Lucy, don't say I didn't. Don't bother
to tell me a lie. What did it mean? Why did you meet him? What are
you doing?"

Lucy jerked her knee away. Her hands were trembling. She took up the
knitting, tried to direct the needles, but they shook and she dropped
them. She made a sharp movement with her head in an effort to avert
her face, but the light was merciless, there was no shade to hide in.

"Oh, don't bother me," she said angrily. "It's not your affair."

Susan's dread rose higher. In a flash of vision she had a glimpse into
the storm-driven depths. It was as if a child brought up in a garden
had unexpectedly looked into a darkling mountain abyss.

"What are you going to do?" she almost whispered. "You mustn't. You
must stop. I thought you didn't care about him. You only laughed and
everybody thought it was a joke. Don't go on that way. Something
dreadful will happen."

Lucy did not answer. With her back pressed against the roof arch and
her hands clinched in her lap--she sat rigid, looking down. She seemed
gripped in a pain that stiffened her body and made her face pinched and
haggard. Under the light cotton covering her breast rose and fell.
She was an embodiment of tortured indecision.

Susan urged: "Let me tell my father and he'll send Zavier away."

Lucy raised her eyes and tried to laugh. The unnatural sound fell with
a metallic harshness on the silence. Her mouth quivered, and putting
an unsteady hand against it, she said brokenly,

"Oh, Missy, don't torment me. I feel bad enough already."

There was a longer pause. Susan broke it in a low voice:

"Then you're going to marry him?"

"No," loudly, "no. What a question!"

She made a grab at her knitting and started feverishly to work, the
needles clicking, stitches dropping, the stocking leg trembling as it
hung.

"Why, he's an Indian," sh