Part 20 (2/2)

It frightened him. Right from the first he was conscious of impending disaster born quite entirely of the knowledge of his own guilt. The front door of the house was open and after fruitless minutes of panicky pondering he clambered down and advanced uncertainly toward it. His shadow across the threshold heralded his reluctant coming, and Dryad turned from the half-filled box upon the table over which she had been bending and nodded to him almost before he caught sight of her.

That little, intimately brief inclination of the head was her only greeting. With hands grasping each side of the door-frame Old Jerry stood there and gazed about the room. It had never been anything but bare and empty looking--now with the few larger pieces of furniture which it had contained all stacked in one corner and the smaller articles already stored away in a half-dozen boxes, the last of which was holding the girl's absorbed attention, it would have been barnlike had it not been so small. From where he stood Old Jerry could see through into the smaller back-room workshop. Even its shelves were empty,--entirely stripped of their rows of tiny white woman-figures.

He paled as he grasped the ominous import of it; he tried to speak unconcernedly, but his voice was none too steady.

”So you're a-house-cleanin', be you?” he asked jauntily. ”Ain't you commencin' a little early?”

He was uncomfortably conscious of that interrogative gleam in Dryad's glance--that amused glimmer which he couldn't quite fathom--when she turned her head. She was smiling, too, a little--smiling with her lips as well as with her eyes.

”No-o-o,” she stated with preoccupied lack of emphasis, as she bent again over the box. ”No--I'm packing up.”

Old Jerry had known that that would be her answer. He had been certain of it. The other interpretation--the only other possible one which could be put upon the dismantled room--had been nothing more or less than a momentary and desperate grasping at a straw.

For a while he was very, very quiet, wondering just what it was in her mind which made her so cheerfully indifferent to his presence. She filled that last box while he stood there in the doorway, stood off to survey her work critically, and then picked up a hammer that lay on the table and prepared to nail down the lid.

”I've hit my finger four times today,” she apprised him between strokes as she drove the first nail home. ”Four times this afternoon--and always the same finger, too!”

The very irrelevancy of the statement, coupled with her calm serenity, was appalling to the old man. She didn't so much as lift her eyes when she told him, but when the lid was fastened she whirled suddenly with that impetuosity which always startled him more than a little, her hands tightly clasped in front of her, and fairly beamed at him.

”There, that finishes everything--everything but the pots and pans,”

she cried. ”And I'll need them a little longer, anyway, won't I? But maybe I won't take them with me, either--they're pretty old and worn out. What do you think?”

Old Jerry cleared his throat. He ignored her question.

”Ain't--ain't this a trifle sudden,” he faltered--”jest a trifle?”

She shook her head again and laughed softly, as if from sheer joyous excitement.

”No,” she said. ”No, I've been planning it for days and days--oh, for more than a week!”

Then she seemed to catch for the first time the dreariness of his whole att.i.tude--the dejection of his spare angular body and sparrowlike, anxious face.

”You're sorry I'm going,” she accused him then, and she leaned toward him a little, eyes quizzically half closed. ”I knew you'd be sorry!”

And then, swiftly, ”Aren't you?”

Old Jerry sc.r.a.ped first one foot and then the other.

”I reckon I be,” he admitted faintly. ”Kinda surprised, too. I--I wa'n't exactly calculating on anything like this. It--it's kinda thrown me off my reckonin'! Are you--are you figurin' on goin' right away?”

Dryad spun about and threw her head far on one side to scan the whole bare room.

”Tomorrow, maybe,” she decided, when she turned back to him. ”Or the next day at the very latest. You see, everything is about ready now, and there isn't any reason for me to stay, on and on, here--is there?”

A little tired note crept into the last words, edging the question with a suggestion of wistfulness. It was something not so very different from that for which Old Jerry had been stubbornly waiting throughout those entire two weeks, but he failed to catch it at that moment. He had heard nothing but her statement that she meant to remain at least another day. It made it possible for him to breathe deeply once again.

Much could happen in twenty-four hours. She might even change her mind, he desperately a.s.sured himself--women were always doing something like that, wern't they? But even if she did go it was a reprieve; it gave him one last opportunity. Now, for the present, all he wanted was to get away--to get away by himself and think! On heavily dragging feet he turned to go back down the rotting boardwalk.

”I--I'll drop in on you tomorrow,” he suggested, pausing at the steps.

”I'll stop in on my way 'round--to--to say good-by.”

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