In his confusion and anger he blurted out, “Little wonder you think of him.  You and that accursed nigger, Chunk—­”

“Hush!” she interrupted in a low, imperious voice, “hush, lest as representative of our house you disgrace yourself beyond hope.”  And she passed quickly to her room.

Within less than an hour he was asking himself in bitter self-upbraiding, “What have I gained?  What can I do?  Prefer charges against my own cousin which I cannot prove?  Impossible!—­Oh, I’ve been a fool again.  I should have kept that knowledge secret till I could use it for a definite purpose.  I’ll break her spirit yet.”

If he had seen her after she reached her room he might have thought it broken then.  Vague dread of the consequences of an act which, from his words, she believed he knew far more about than he did, mingled with her anger and feelings of repugnance.  “Oh,” she moaned, “it was just horrible; it was coming straight down from the sublime to the contemptible.  That noble old colonel took me to the very gate of heaven.  Now I’m fairly trembling with passion and fear.  Oh, why will Cousin Mad always stir up the very worst of my feelings!  I’d rather suffer and die as poor Yarry did than marry a man who will think only of his little self at such a time as this!”

CHAPTER XXVII

AUN’ JINKEY’S SUPREME TEST

The first long tragic day of hospital experience had so absorbed Miss Lou as to relegate into the background events which a short time before had been beyond her wildest dreams.  In the utter negation of her life she had wished that something would happen, and so much had happened and so swiftly that she was bewildered.  The strangest thing of all was the change in herself.  Lovers of the Whately and Maynard type could only repel by their tactics.  She was too high-spirited to submit to the one, and too simple and sincere, still too much of a child, to feel anything but annoyance at the sentimental gallantry of the other.  The genial spirit of comradeship in Scoville, could it have been maintained through months of ordinary life, would probably have prepared the way for deeper feeling on the part of both, but there had been no time for the gradual development of goodwill and friendly understanding into something more.  They had been caught in an unexpected whirl of events and swept forward into relations utterly unforeseen.  He owed his escape from much dreaded captivity and his very life to her, and, as he had said, these facts, to her generous nature, were even more powerful in their influence than if she herself had received the priceless favors.  At the same time, her course toward him, dictated at first by mere humanity, then goodwill, had made his regard for her seem natural even to her girlish heart.  If she had read it all in a book, years before, she would have said, “A man couldn’t do less than love one when fortune had enabled her to do so much for him.”  So she had simply approved of his declaration, down by the run, of affection for which she was not yet ready, and she approved of him all the more fondly because he did not passionately and arbitrarily demand or expect that she should feel as he did, in return.  “I didn’t,” she had said to herself a score of times, “and that was enough for him.”