Love stories; North Carolina -- Fiction; Women singers -- Fiction
How she could love a man! He recalled her gesture when she said: "I will
tell you everything"! The glance through the lashes--"I've a fancy for
my own way"! the forgetting of his presence for the song-singing and the
sunset, coming back to talk with him; a pleading child!
By the lake he paused, and, looking into the moonlit water, came to his
conclusions sanely enough. He would see her no more. There would be many
people for the next fortnight to occupy his time; the coming folks were
interesting. Anne Lennox would be there; the time would pass; he would
leave Ravenel; but as he dropped asleep a voice seemed to call to him
through the pines, and he knew he would not go.
The next morning before coffee he wrote to Dr. Johnston, the great
specialist in alcoholic diseases, urging him to come to Ravenel at his
earliest convenience. "There is a man to be helped," he wrote, "and
neither money nor brains are to be spared in the helping."
Through the breakfast the memory of Katrine was vividly with him. He
recalled, with the approval of an aristocrat in taste, the daintiness of
her movements, the delicacy of her hands as they lay open on the fence,
even her indifference to him, to him, who was in no wise accustomed to
indifference in women.
At twilight he went to the Chestnut Ridge, but Katrine was not there,
nor did she come. The following day he went again with a similar
resulting. The third day he saw her about noon on the river-bank, and
she waved her hand to him in a cavalier fashion, disappearing into a
small copse of dogwood, not to reappear. The thing had become amusing.
During this time he saw neither Dermott McDermott nor the new overseer,
whom he learned was at Marlton on affairs concerning a sawmill.
The fourth day after his meeting with Katrine a message from the great
doctor gave him the dignity of a mission, and he rode to the old lodge
to show her the letter, which said that Dr. Johnston would be at Ravenel
soon.
There was eagerness in his gait and eyes as he mounted his horse, and as
he rode down the carriageway standing in his stirrups, waving his cap to
his mother with a "Tallyho to the hounds," he had never looked handsomer
nor had more of an air of carrying all before him, as was right, she
thought, for a Ravenel.
The old gate-lodge on the Ravenel place stands on the north branch of
the road which leads to Three Poplar Inn. It is built of pale-colored
English brick and gray stones, and runs upward to the height of two
stories, with broad doorways and wide windows peeping through ivy which
covers the place from foundation to roof.
Frank remembered it as a drear-looking, lonesome place during the
occupancy of the former incumbent. Instead, he found a reclaimed garden;
hedges of laurel, trim and straight; old-fashioned flowers, snowballs,
gillybells, great pink-and-white peonies; and over the front on
trellises, by the gate and doorway, scrambles of scarlet roses against
the green and the ivied walls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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