t
do you mean?"

"I mean," she said, with a slight shiver of resignation and scorn,
"if you--oh dear! if IT'S ALL going to be like THEM, let's keep it to
ourselves."

He gazed at her in hopeless bewilderment. Did she really mean that she
was more frightened at the possible revelation of their disagreement
than of their intimacy?

"Come," she continued tenderly, still glancing, however, uneasily around
her, "come! We'll be more comfortable in the hollow. It's only a step."
Still holding him by her braid she half led, half dragged him away. To
the right was one of those sudden depressions in the ground caused by
the subsidence of the earth from hidden springs and the uprooting of one
or two of the larger trees. When she had forced him down this declivity
below the level of the needle-strewn forest floor, she seated him upon
a mossy root, and shaking out her skirts in a half childlike, half
coquettish way, comfortably seated herself in his lap, with her arm
supplementing the clinging braid around his neck.

"Now hark to me, and don't holler so loud," she said turning his face to
her questioning eyes. "What's gone of you anyway, nigger boy?" It
should be premised that Cressy's terms of endearment were mainly
negro-dialectical, reminiscences of her brief babyhood, her slave-nurse,
and the only playmates she had ever known.

Still implacable, the master coldly repeated the counts of his
indictment against the girl's strange indifference and still stranger
entanglements, winding up by setting forth the whole story of his
interview with her mother, his forced defence of the barn, Seth's
outspoken accusation, and their silent and furious struggle in the loft.
But if he had expected that this daughter of a Southwestern fighter
would betray any enthusiasm over her lover's participation in one of
their characteristic feuds--if he looked for any fond praise for his own
prowess, he was bitterly mistaken. She loosened her arm from his neck
of her own accord, unwound the braid, and putting her two little hands
clasped between her knees, crossed her small feet before her, and,
albeit still in his lap, looked the picture of languid dejection.

"Maw ought to have more sense, and you ought to have lit out of the
window after me," she said with a lazy sigh. "Fightin' ain't in your
line--it's too much like THEM. That Seth's sure to get even with you."

"I can protect myself," he said haughtily. Nevertheless he had a
depressing consc