A new couple came out of the shadow and strolled across the patch of
open moonlight toward the summer-house. The girl was she who had picked
him up on the road, and the man was Henry Falkins. Even in evening
dress, there was no mistaking the features, and that shirt-front was a
target to even an amateur's taste.
The girl wore a filmy gown and about her bare shoulders was thrown some
silky thing as iridescent as gossamer. But, unlike those others who had
come there, she was not laughing.
Instead, she was looking up with a very direct gaze into the man's face,
and her eyes and lips bore a somewhat wistful seriousness.
At the front of the summer-house, her companion stopped and broke a
spray of bloom from the vine.
"It always reminds me of you," he told her in a soft voice. "There may
be sweeter fragrances, but I doubt it. I guess that's why."
He lifted a drooping branch of leaf and bloom, and she passed under his
arm.
Newt Spooner was lying only a few yards away, but he must be closer. The
mass of vine obscured his line of vision, and he had no wish to kill
the girl. Behind his ambuscade of trellised supports, he could come near
enough to reach his hand through and touch his victim if he chose. It
was almost too simple--too easy. Yet, after all, it was a bad
arrangement, though that he could not remedy. He must announce himself
to the man he meant to kill, or defeat the satisfaction of revenge. To
let him die without realizing why would rob the punishment of its sting.
Then the woman would doubtless make an outcry, and his chance of escape
would end. Besides that there was a second objection: the girl had
befriended him. He was to some extent "beholden to her." He wished now
that he had refused to drive with her; but, when he had accepted her
invitation, he had had no idea that his purpose could concern her, and
his purpose came first.
Newt Spooner drew very near. He cautiously pulled back a branch of the
honey-suckle, and looked through. The girl was sitting with her eyes
downcast, and the man standing with one knee on the rough bench. He was
leaning forward and his voice, though tense with earnestness, was almost
a whisper. Newt might at that moment have been noisy instead of
noiseless without danger of distracting the attention of that man and
woman.
At home in the mountains, Henry Falkins would have been more wary, but
here in the bluegrass he had laid aside all thoughts of danger, as he
had laid aside his high-laced boots and corduroys. He was standing at
the other side of life's gamut. Enmity, for him, did not exist. The
universe was filled, he believed at that moment, to the boundary of the
last sentinel star with love. The night breathed it. He was breathing
it, the girl's eyes were just then raised to meet his, brimming with a
light that set his pulses bounding.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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